GlusterFS is a scalable network filesystem. It aggregates the local block devices of the hosts into large, distributed storage solutions. In this way, you do not need expensive SAN nodes and your storage scales up with your cluster.

flexVDI 3.1 introduces Gluster Volumes, with the following features:

Optimized access to Guest images stored in a GlusterFS volume.
Easy creation of new GlusterFS volumes, or integration of existing ones.

Experimental

Gluster Volumes are an experimental feature. Stability and performance issues have been observed, so use it at your own risk. Besides, any action other than creating a volume is still not available through flexVDI Dashboard and must be performed with the GlusterFS CLI tools.

Setup

On CentOS, you must install the respective package from the CentOS Storage SIG. At the time of writing this article, the current package is centos-release-gluster41 and is available from the CentOS Extras repository. From the host shell, run:

# yum install centos-release-gluster41
# yum install glusterfs-server

Follow the Quick Start guide from the Storage SIG to prepare your hosts. You can create the GlusterFS volumes on your own, and then instruct flexVDI to use them when you create a Gluster Volume, or you can just mount the bricks and create the GlusterFS volume with flexVDI Dashboard. In this last case, take into account that flexVDI requires that bricks belonging to the same volume are mounted in the same path in all the participating hosts. Follow the section on Storage to know more about managing Gluster Volumes with flexVDI Dashboard.

On RHEL, follow the Red Hat Gluster Storage installation guide.