Using GlusterFS for VM images

WARNING: The instructions on this wiki page are based on advice but haven't been tested. You can help by testing them (and then improving them and removing this warning).

Overview

The recommended way to use GlusterFS with upstream Xen is to mount glusterfs as your filesystem, and store the VM images as files inside it (similar to what one might do for NFS).

Prerequisites

• To begin with, you need a Gluster volume set up. Doing so is beyond the scope of this document; please see the [Gluster documentation http://gluster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/] for more details.

• On your Xen host, you will need the Gluster client installed.

Directions

• Mount the GlusterFS volume

Say you have your gluster server at location server, volume vm-images, and you want to mount it at /images:

   mount -t glusterfs server:vm-images /images

• Create your disk image

There are some examples of how to create disk images on

• Use your xl.cfg normally, with files from within the mounted filesystem:

   disk = [ 'vdev=hda,format=raw,target=/images/c6-01.raw'  ]