DownloadGlusterFS oVirt Setup Guide
From GlusterDocumentation
Contents |
About Red Hat oVirt
oVirt is a free Red Hat / Fedora specific virtualization management system that allows you to manage virtual machines through a web interface using libvirt. The libvirt library allows oVirt to manage virtual machines hosted on KVM virtual machine servers. oVirt is an open source software with backing from Red Hat; oVirt will become the standard for Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization.
About GlusterFS
GlusterFS is a free / open source clustered file system. GlusterFS is a powerful and flexible solution that simplifies the task of managing unstructured file data whether you have a few terabytes of storage or multiple petabytes. GlusterFS runs on industry standard hardware from any vendor. GlusterFS delivers multiple times the scalability and performance of conventional storage at a fraction of the cost.
GlusterFS clusters together storage building blocks, aggregating disk and memory resources and managing your data in a single global namespace. GlusterFS is based on a stackable architecture that can be optimized for specific application profiles with simple plug-in modules, optimizing performance for a wide range of workloads.
Compute and Storage Virtualization
Traditional NFS and iSCSI solutions create I/O bottlenecks as your virtual machine environment scales. The storage box is also often a single point of failure. Managing multiple NAS volumes and iSCSI LUNs leads to excessive management costs. GlusterFS adds virtualized storage capability to oVirt. Individual storage servers can be consolidated in a virtual storage pool with a global namespace. GlusterFS takes care of complete storage management, including replication, high availability, and volume management.
Image derived from Red Hat oVirt project documentation
Red Hat libvirt natively mounts the GlusterFS VM image volume (storage pool) to launch virtual machines. Multiple VM images can be hosted on a single global volume unless administrator prefers to group them under different volume names. Applications access GlusterFS volumes through native GlusterFS, NFS, CIFS, FTP, and WebDAV.
GlusterFS Installation
Storage Server Installation
1. Install minimal Fedora 10 x86-64 on your storage server.
2. Add the GlusterFS repository to your YUM setup:
# rpm -ivh http://ftp.gluster.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/ovirt/ovirt-gluster-release-LATEST.fc10.noarch.rpm
3. Install the GlusterFS server and its dependencies:
# yum --enablerepo=ovirt install glusterfs-server
4. Verify your installation:
# glusterfsd --version glusterfs 2.0.2 built on Jun 19 2009 10:15:10 Repository revision: 07019da2e16534d527215a91904298ede09bb798 Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Z RESEARCH Inc. <http://www.zresearch.com>
Note: Patches to improve mmap write performance are included in the RPMs provided through the YUM repository.
Configuring Storage Servers
Select a configuration template from GlusterFS Configuration documentation. You can choose to host your oVirt storage pool on a Standalone Storage (NFS Like) or a Distributed Storage. If you need a highly available setup, look for the Distributed Replicated Storage configuration.
Storage servers should be connected to both oVirt and virtual machine networks. Create separate volumes for virtual machine images and application data (running on the virtual machines).
GlusterFS Client Installation
GlusterFS client is integrated into Red Hat oVirt. Follow the oVirt installation instructions below. oVirt provides browser based storage management interface to create and manage storage pools.
oVirt Installation
Fetch the GlusterFS integrated oVirt RPMs, and follow the standard oVirt Installation Instructions. Excluding the section "Getting oVirt RPMs," all steps remain the same.
Installing the ovirt-gluster-release-LATEST.fc10.noarch.rpm package, adds the GlusterFS oVirt repository to your YUM configuration. RPMs are pre-built for Fedora-10 x86-64 architecture. All oVirt related RPMs are self-contained within this repository. (It is an interim solution till GlusterFS patches are accepted by the oVirt mainstream.)
sudo rpm -ivh http://ftp.gluster.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/ovirt/ovirt-gluster-release-LATEST.fc10.noarch.rpm
Update any existing RPMs with newer RPMs available in the oVirt GlusterFS repository.
sudo yum update --enablerepo=ovirt-glusterfs
Install additional RPMs from the oVirt GlusterFS repository.
sudo yum install --enablerepo=ovirt-glusterfs ovirt-server ovirt-server-installer ovirt-node-image ovirt-node-image-pxe
Example oVirt Storage Screenshots for GlusterFS
To the user, the only visible change in GlusterFS integrated oVirt is the storage pool type. Select the storage pool type GlusterFS, and rest of the procedure is same as that described in oVirt Install Instructions.
Please follow the examples provided below for storage UI usage.
Storage Setup
Click on Add Storage to create a new storage pool.
Add Storage Pool
Map GlusterFS export as a storage pool named vmimages. The IP address is the address of the first node from the GlusterFS storage cluster. Export is the volume exported from the storage cluster.
Add New Volume
Create an oVirt volume named Fedora-10.
Volume Listing
The oVirt Storage tab now lists the created pool/volume.
Add Virtual Machine
Add a virtual machine to Fedora-10 volume on vmimages storage pool.
Questions and Feedback
Please write to dl-ovirt(at)gluster.com for questions and feedback related to GlusterFS + oVirt installation. We are eager to hear about your deployment.
Developers Corner
A brief Technical overview of the patches
Patches per project listing
Per patch one liner README
