GlusterFS Concepts
Internal
Overview
GlusterFS is a storage technology that uses volumes hosted on different servers to construct a distributed replicated network file system. The file system is fully POSIX compliant. It also supports storage paradigms as Block Storage and Object Storage.
GlusterFS stores the data on stable kernel file-systems like ext4 or xfs. It does not use an additional metadata server, it uses instead an unique hash tag for each file, stored within the file system itself.
GlusterFS uses the concept of volume
Volume
A volume is a logical share exposed to clients. A volume may consist in several subvolumes, generally hosted by different servers. The servers in question host kernel space file-systems.
Volume Types
Distributed Volume
A distributed volume spreads the data across the available bricks. 100 files written on a volume built by two bricks, on average 50 will end up on one brick, and 50 on the other. The system is similar to RAID0 for physical disks.
Replicated Volume
Striped Volume
Subvolume
A subvolume is built by a brick.
Brick
Translator
Organizatiorium
Provides two interface to storage: POSIX file-system and via a REST gateway for object storage support.
Provides high availability of data and metadata.
Heketi Heketi provides a RESTful management interface which can be used to manage the life cycle of GlusterFS volumes https://github.com/heketi/heketi