High-Availability Storage With GlusterFS 3.2.x On Ubuntu 11.10 - Automatic File Replication (Mirror) Across Two Storage Servers

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Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 04/02/2012

This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (Ubuntu 11.10) that use GlusterFS. Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The client system (Ubuntu 11.10 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

In this tutorial I use three systems, two servers and a client:

• server1.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.100 (server)
• server2.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.101 (server)
• client1.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.102 (client)

Because we will run all the steps from this tutorial with root privileges, we can either prepend all commands in this tutorial with the string sudo, or we become root right now by typing

sudo su

All three systems should be able to resolve the other systems' hostnames. If this cannot be done through DNS, you should edit the /etc/hosts file so that it looks as follows on all three systems:

vi /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost
192.168.0.100   server1.example.com     server1
192.168.0.101   server2.example.com     server2
192.168.0.102   client1.example.com     client1

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

(It is also possible to use IP addresses instead of hostnames in the following setup. If you prefer to use IP addresses, you don't have to care about whether the hostnames can be resolved or not.)

2 Setting Up The GlusterFS Servers

server1.example.com/server2.example.com:

GlusterFS is available as a package for Ubuntu 11.10, therefore we can install it as follows:

apt-get install glusterfs-server

The command

glusterfsd --version

should now show the GlusterFS version that you've just installed (3.2.1 in this case):

root@server1:~# glusterfsd --version
glusterfs 3.2.1 built on Jun 28 2011 07:43:56
Repository revision: v3.2.1
Copyright (c) 2006-2010 Gluster Inc. <http://www.gluster.com>
GlusterFS comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of GlusterFS under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License.
root@server1:~#

If you use a firewall, ensure that TCP ports 111, 24007, 24008, 24009-(24009 + number of bricks across all volumes) are open on server1.example.com and server2.example.com.

Next we must add server2.example.com to the trusted storage pool (please note that I'm running all GlusterFS configuration commands from server1.example.com, but you can as well run them from server2.example.com because the configuration is repliacted between the GlusterFS nodes - just make sure you use the correct hostnames or IP addresses):

server1.example.com:

On server1.example.com, run

gluster peer probe server2.example.com

root@server1:~# gluster peer probe server2.example.com
Probe successful
root@server1:~#

The status of the trusted storage pool should now be similar to this:

gluster peer status

root@server1:~# gluster peer status
Number of Peers: 1

Hostname: server2.example.com
Uuid: 7cd93007-fccb-4fcb-8063-133e6ba81cd9
State: Peer in Cluster (Connected)
root@server1:~#

Next we create the share named testvol with two replicas (please note that the number of replicas is equal to the number of servers in this case because we want to set up mirroring) on server1.example.com and server2.example.com in the /data directory (this will be created if it doesn't exist):

gluster volume create testvol replica 2 transport tcp server1.example.com:/data server2.example.com:/data

root@server1:~# gluster volume create testvol replica 2 transport tcp server1.example.com:/data server2.example.com:/data
Creation of volume testvol has been successful. Please start the volume to access data.
root@server1:~#

Start the volume:

gluster volume start testvol

It is possible that the above command tells you that the action was not successful:

root@server1:~# gluster volume start testvol
Starting volume testvol has been unsuccessful
root@server1:~#

In this case you should check the output of...

server1.example.com/server2.example.com:

netstat -tap | grep glusterfsd

on both servers.

If you get output like this...

root@server1:~# netstat -tap | grep glusterfsd
tcp        0      0 *:24009                 *:*                     LISTEN      1548/glusterfsd
tcp        0      0 localhost.localdom:1019 localhost.localdo:24007 ESTABLISHED 1548/glusterfsd
root@server1:~#

... everything is fine, but if you don't get any output...

root@server2:~# netstat -tap | grep glusterfsd
root@server2:~#

... restart the GlusterFS daemon on the corresponding server (server2.example.com in this case):

server2.example.com:

/etc/init.d/glusterfs-server restart

Then check the output of...

netstat -tap | grep glusterfsd

... again on that server - it should now look like this:

root@server2:~# netstat -tap | grep glusterfsd
tcp        0      0 *:24010                 *:*                     LISTEN      1458/glusterfsd
tcp        0      0 localhost.localdom:1021 localhost.localdo:24007 ESTABLISHED 1458/glusterfsd
root@server2:~#

Now back to server1.example.com:

server1.example.com:

You can check the status of the volume with the command

gluster volume info

root@server1:~# gluster volume info

Volume Name: testvol
Type: Replicate
Status: Started
Number of Bricks: 2
Transport-type: tcp
Bricks:
Brick1: server1.example.com:/data
Brick2: server2.example.com:/data
root@server1:~#

By default, all clients can connect to the volume. If you want to grant access to client1.example.com (= 192.168.0.102) only, run:

gluster volume set testvol auth.allow 192.168.0.102

Please note that it is possible to use wildcards for the IP addresses (like 192.168.*) and that you can specify multiple IP addresses separated by comma (e.g. 192.168.0.102,192.168.0.103).

The volume info should now show the updated status:

gluster volume info

root@server1:~# gluster volume info

Volume Name: testvol
Type: Replicate
Status: Started
Number of Bricks: 2
Transport-type: tcp
Bricks:
Brick1: server1.example.com:/data
Brick2: server2.example.com:/data
Options Reconfigured:
auth.allow: 192.168.0.102
root@server1:~#