High-Availability Storage With GlusterFS On CentOS 5.4 - Automatic File Replication (Mirror) Across Two Storage Servers

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
Follow me on Twitter
Last edited 02/22/2010

This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (CentOS 5.4) 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 (CentOS 5.4 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)

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 contains the following lines on all three systems:

vi /etc/hosts

[...]
192.168.0.100           server1.example.com server1
192.168.0.101           server2.example.com server2
192.168.0.102           client1.example.com client1
[...]

(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 isn't available as a package for CentOS 5.4, therefore we have to build it ourselves. First we install the prerequisites:

yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'

yum groupinstall 'Development Libraries'

yum install libibverbs-devel fuse-devel

Then we download the latest GlusterFS release from http://www.gluster.org/download.php and build it as follows:

cd /tmp
wget http://ftp.gluster.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/2.0/LATEST/glusterfs-2.0.9.tar.gz
tar xvfz glusterfs-2.0.9.tar.gz
cd glusterfs-2.0.9
./configure

At the end of the ./configure command, you should see something like this:

[...]
GlusterFS configure summary
===========================
FUSE client        : yes
Infiniband verbs   : yes
epoll IO multiplex : yes
Berkeley-DB        : yes
libglusterfsclient : yes
argp-standalone    : no

[root@server1 glusterfs-2.0.9]#

make && make install
ldconfig

Check the GlusterFS version afterwards (should be 2.0.9):

glusterfs --version

[root@server1 glusterfs-2.0.9]# glusterfs --version
glusterfs 2.0.9 built on Mar 1 2010 15:34:50
Repository revision: v2.0.9
Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Gluster Inc. <http://www.gluster.com>
GlusterFS comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of GlusterFS under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
[root@server1 glusterfs-2.0.9]#

Next we create a few directories:

mkdir /data/
mkdir /data/export
mkdir /data/export-ns
mkdir /etc/glusterfs

Now we create the GlusterFS server configuration file /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol which defines which directory will be exported (/data/export) and what client is allowed to connect (192.168.0.102 = client1.example.com):

vi /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol

volume posix
  type storage/posix
  option directory /data/export
end-volume

volume locks
  type features/locks
  subvolumes posix
end-volume

volume brick
  type performance/io-threads
  option thread-count 8
  subvolumes locks
end-volume

volume server
  type protocol/server
  option transport-type tcp
  option auth.addr.brick.allow 192.168.0.102
  subvolumes brick
end-volume

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).

Afterwards we create the following symlink...

ln -s /usr/local/sbin/glusterfsd /sbin/glusterfsd

... and then the system startup links for the GlusterFS server and start it:

chkconfig --levels 35 glusterfsd on
/etc/init.d/glusterfsd start