GlusterFS Concepts

Internal

• GlusterFS

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.

Subvolume

A subvolume is built by a brick.

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