Blogs

Gluster, CIFS, ZFS - kind of part 2

A while ago I put together a post detailing the installation and configuration of 2 hosts running glusterfs, which was then presented as CIFS based storage.

http://jonarcher.info/2014/06/windows-cifs-fileshares-using-glusterfs-ctdb-highly-available-data/

This post gained a bit of interest through the comments and social networks, one of the comments I got was from John Mark Walker suggesting I look at the samba-gluster vfs method instead of mounting the filesystem using fuse (directly access the volume from samba, instead of mounting then presenting). On top of this I’ve also been looking quite a bit at ZFS, whereas previously I had a Linux RAID as the base filesystem. So here is a slightly different approach to my previous post.

Upgrade CentOS 6 to 7 with Upgrade Tools

I decided to try the upgrade process from EL 6 to 7 on the servers I used in my previous blog post “Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data”

Following the instructions here I found the process fairly painless. However there were 1 or two little niggles which caused various issues which I will detail here.

The servers were minimal CentOS 6.5 installs, with Gluster volumes shared via CTDB. The extra packages installed had mostly come from the EPEL or Glusterfs repositories, and I believe this is where the issues arise - third party repositories.

Windows (CIFS) fileshares using GlusterFS and CTDB for Highly available data

This tutorial will walk through the setup and configuration of GlusterFS and CTDB to provide highly available file storage via CIFS. GlusterFS is used to replicate data between multiple servers. CTDB provides highly available CIFS/Samba functionality.

Prerequisites:

2 servers (virtual or physical) with RHEL 6 or derivative (CentOS, Scientific Linux). When installing create a partition for root of around 16Gb, but leave a large amount of disk space available for the shared data (you can add this in the installer but ensure the partition type is XFS and that the mountpoint is /gluster/bricks/data1) Once you have an installed system, ensure networking is configured and running, in this example the two servers will be: