This tutorial exists for these OS versions
- Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal)
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)
- Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)
- Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)
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Distributed Replicated Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Ubuntu 9.10
Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme
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This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 9.10) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (Ubuntu 9.10 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 five systems, four servers and a client:
- server1.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.100 (server)
- server2.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.101 (server)
- server3.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.102 (server)
- server4.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.103 (server)
- client1.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.104 (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 five 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 five 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 server3.example.com server3 192.168.0.103 server4.example.com server4 192.168.0.104 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/server3.example.com/server4.example.com:
GlusterFS is available as a package for Ubuntu 9.10, therefore we can install it as follows:
aptitude install glusterfs-server
The command
glusterfs --version
should now show the GlusterFS version that you've just installed (2.0.2 in this case):
root@server1:~# glusterfs --version
glusterfs 2.0.2 built on Jun 29 2009 23:49:59
Repository revision: 07019da2e16534d527215a91904298ede09bb798
Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Z RESEARCH Inc. <http://www.zresearch.com>
GlusterFS comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of GlusterFS under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
root@server1:~#
Next we create a few directories:
mkdir /data/
mkdir /data/export
mkdir /data/export-ns
Now we create the GlusterFS server configuration file /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol (we make a backup of the original /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol file first) which defines which directory will be exported (/data/export) and what client is allowed to connect (192.168.0.104 = client1.example.com):
cp /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol_orig
cat /dev/null > /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol
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 192.168.0.104 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. 192.168.0.104,192.168.0.105).
Afterwards we start the GlusterFS server:
/etc/init.d/glusterfs-server start