Pages

12/08/2010

Gluster Progress

This is still a work in progress, but so far very successful.

Gluster Storage Platform allows you to basically build your own storage cloud.  It allows for CIFS, NFS, FTP, and it's own native GlusterFS connector. And here is my own experiencing with setting it up.

We had (2) Dell Poweredge 8950's and some old Apple XRaid storage not longer in production in our environment.  Trying to stay on the more conservative side in spending additional funds to improve our infrastructure, I decided these would be prime candidates.

So I take the 15 minutes to put the fibre channel cards in and get the 8950's wired into our back network and plugged into the Apple XRaid via Fibre.  On the Gluster website, they have 3 different ways you can install the OS.  First, you can download a Virtual Machine prebuilt and ready to go. Second, you can download a ISO image and use that to build a Virtual Machine from scratch, but not use it as a boot cd for a physical machine.  Last, you can download an img file and setup a bootable usb drive, this is a the method I went with.

Plug in the USB Flash Drive and open the terminal
run "dd if=Gluster-3.1.img of=/dev/sdc bs=1M", keep in mind you need to change the location of the img and location of the usb drive


This takes a few minutes. Once done, pop it into one of the server and boot it up. You will be presented with a menu. First you can to say new server cloud.

Once you do that, you need to select a OS drive and Network Config. Then it will install.

Once done, you will be given the default password.


Reboot and open a web browser on another machine and you can login. From there you can create new volumes or add more servers.  To add another server, boot the new server from the usb drive and select expand the cloud.  Then jump over to the web panel of the master server and click add new server.  This will tell it to go find the new server, install, and add it to the cluster.

Once your two machines are setup you can see storage from each server.  When creating a new volume, you have the option to mirror the two or more machines with multiple protocols.  If you have a load balancer you can input both IP's into it and load balance storage with active-mirroring.  

Very cool stuff, simple and easy to use.  Check out www.gluster.com for more information.


No comments:

Post a Comment