GlusterFS is a mature, elegant and powerful distributed filesystem targeted at very high capacities and availability. Sponsored by Red Hat Inc. and included in their storage server solution, this open-source software is kindly available for some other Linux distributions package system or as sources.

Unlike many other distributed solutions, there is no need to have many computers in order to have a taste of Gluster ease of use. A few minutes to spare is fairly enough to do it on your own computer. Note also that only the amd64 architecture is present in the repository and thus the following apply to those 64 bits machines only.

First, add the GnuPG key for the repository and the corresponding entry for APT:

wget -O - http://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/3.4/3.4.3/Debian/pubkey.gpg | apt-key add -
echo "deb [ arch=amd64 ] http://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/3.4/3.4.3/Debian/apt wheezy main" >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/glusterfs.list


The arch option is useful, as documented in Multiarch specs in case you’re using multiarch with some foreign architecture package already installed.

Next, update the packages database and install both the server and client packages:

apt-get update
apt-get install glusterfs-server glusterfs-client


Now, either you have a whole disk or partition available or, like me, you don’t. Let’s just use a file as our disk then. In any case, the goal is to format our disk, preferably with XFS, and mount it.

Doing it with a disk or a partition is left to the reader’s discretion and knowledge ;] with a file, it’s as easy as (thanks to this libgfapi doc):

truncate -s 5GB /srv/xfsdisk
mkfs.xfs -i size=512 /srv/xfsdisk
mkdir -p /export/brick
echo "/srv/xfsdisk /export/brick xfs loop,inode64,noatime,nodiratime 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
mount /export/brick


Last tip before starting our cluster, as Gluster doesn’t want us to use localhost as a valid node hostname, we add a definition for another name on our loopback network:

echo "127.0.1.1 localnode" >>/etc/hosts


Now the real work with Gluster may begin; first, create a directory in the dedicated mount-point and add it as a brick on our upcoming volume:

mkdir /export/brick/b1
gluster volume create test localnode:/export/brick/b1


Last, start the volume and enjoy, it’s working.

gluster volume start test


And now…? Now you may play a little with the powerful gluster CLI, gluster help will output the available commands. You may also be a client of your cluster storage (yes, you can) by simply mounting the volume somewhere, like:

mkdir /mnt/gluster
mount -t glusterfs localnode:/test /mnt/gluster