The Gluster Blog

Gluster blog stories provide high-level spotlights on our users all over the world

Using Gluster as Primary Storage in CoudStack

Gluster
2013-12-01

CloudStack could use a Gluster environment for different kind of storage types:

  1. Primary Storage: mount over the GlusterFS native client (FUSE)
    This post shows how it is working and refers to the patches that make this possible.
  2. Volumes for virtual machines: use the libgfapi integration in QEMU
    Next upcoming task, initial untested patch in the wip-branch.
  3. Secondary Storage: mount over the GlusterFS native client (FUSE)

The current work-in-progress repository on the Gluster Community Forge already has functional support for creating Primary Storage on existing Gluster environments:

  • Infrastructure -> Primary Storage -> Add Primary Storage
    Add Primary Storage
  • Infrastructure -> Zones -> Add Zone - [wizard]
    Add Primary Storage through the Zone Wizard

Via the Infrastructure -> Primary Storage menu, the details of the newly created storage can be displayed.

Primary Storage Details

After creating a virtual machine from the standard CentOS template, it can be verified that the Primary Storage Pool on the Gluster environment is functioning. On the hypervisor that runs the VM:

[root@agent ~]# mount | grep gluster
gluster.cloudstack.example.net:/primary on /mnt/dd697445-f67c-33bc-af52-386de3ff7245 type fuse.glusterfs (rw,default_permissions,allow_other,max_read=131072)

[root@agent ~]# ps -C qemu-kvm -o command | grep i-2-3-VM
/usr/libexec/qemu-kvm -name i-2-3-VM ... -drive file=/mnt/dd697445-f67c-33bc-af52-386de3ff7245/1afd48d2-c5e1-44ce-bcb3-051cc4d59716,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0,format=qcow2,cache=none ...

The changes to CloudStack that make this possible are located on the Gluster Community Forge and have been posted for review:

  • [#15932] Add support for Primary Storage on Gluster using the libvirt backend
  • [#15933] Add Gluster to the list of protocols in the Management Server

BLOG

  • 06 Dec 2020
    Looking back at 2020 – with g...

    2020 has not been a year we would have been able to predict. With a worldwide pandemic and lives thrown out of gear, as we head into 2021, we are thankful that our community and project continued to receive new developers, users and make small gains. For that and a...

    Read more
  • 27 Apr 2020
    Update from the team

    It has been a while since we provided an update to the Gluster community. Across the world various nations, states and localities have put together sets of guidelines around shelter-in-place and quarantine. We request our community members to stay safe, to care for their loved ones, to continue to be...

    Read more
  • 03 Feb 2020
    Building a longer term focus for Gl...

    The initial rounds of conversation around the planning of content for release 8 has helped the project identify one key thing – the need to stagger out features and enhancements over multiple releases. Thus, while release 8 is unlikely to be feature heavy as previous releases, it will be the...

    Read more