In this tutorial I will show you how to install GlusterFS in a scalable way to create a storage cluster, starting with 2 servers on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server. Files will be replicated and splitted accross all servers which is some sort of RAID 10 (raid 1 with < 4 servers). With 4 servers that have each 100GB hard drive, total storage will be 200GB and if one server fails, the data will still be intact and files on the failed server will be replicated on another working server.

1. Introduction

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 server with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

2. Installation

First you need to install some software :

sudo su

apt-get install sshfs build-essential flex bison byacc vim wget

Now we need to install fuse from source :

cd /root/
wget http://europe.gluster.org/glusterfs/fuse/fuse-2.7.4glfs11.tar.gz
tar -zxvf fuse-2.7.4glfs11.tar.gz
cd /root/fuse-2.7.4glfs11

Now we compile fuse :

./configure
make && make install

Now we will install GlusterFS :

Get the same exact version, otherwise there is good chances it wont work. I tried with 2.0.0rc1 and 1.3.12 and there was some issues (1.4.0rc7 works fine).

cd /root/
wget http://ftp.gluster.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/2.0/LATEST/glusterfs-2.0.0rc2.tar.gz
tar -zxvf glusterfs-2.0.0rc2.tar.gz
cd /root/glusterfs-2.0.0rc2/

Take a minute break and compile :

./configure
make && make install

For some reasons, libraries are going in the wrong directory so we need to (if someone has a clean fix to this please post it!) :

cp /usr/local/lib/* -R /usr/lib/

Now we create some folders that will be used later on :

mkdir /mnt/glusterfs
mkdir /data/
mkdir /data/export
mkdir /data/export-ns
mkdir /etc/glusterfs/

The fun begins on the next page :)

Next page : 3. Servers configuration