When I started the gluster-deploy project, the main requirement I had for a gluster setup wizard was to support a single volume configuration. However, over time that's changed - in no small part, due to OpenStack!
Once glusterfs provided support for OpenStack, multi-volume setups were needed to support different volumes for glance and cinder, each optimised for their respective workloads.
So this requirement slowly rose to the top of my to-do list, and now version 0.8 is available on the gluster forge. The 0.7 and 0.8 releases have extended the tool to provide:
- support for thin provisioned gluster bricks based on LVM
- support for raid alignment of the bricks (through globals set in the deploy.cfg file)
- more flexibility on the node discovery page (you can now change you mind when defining which peers to use in your config)
- introduced a volume queue concept to allow multiple volume to be defined in a single run
- provide the ability to change characteristics of the volumes in the queue
- added the ability to mount volumes defined for hadoop across all nodes (converged storage + compute use case)
- provide the ability to set a tuned profile across all nodes during the brick creation phase
Here's a video showing the tool running against a beta version of the new Red Hat Storage 3.0 product, which also provides a quick taste of volume level snapshots that are coming in version 3.6 of glusterfs.
Onwards, towards 1.0!
