GlusterFS – Real Time Data Replication Across Multiple RHEL/CentOS Nodes

What is GlusterFS?

GlusterFS is an open-source network/cluster filesystem and is based on a stackable user-space design. In this tutorial, we will achieve high availability of storage(i.e real-time replication of files) across two Linux machines using GlusterFS. Although glusterfs found its application in different areas like cloud computing, streaming media services, and content delivery networks. In this tutorial, we will use the term brick (It is the storage filesystem that has been assigned to a volume).

In Our case, we are using two Centos 6.2 Machines, and Using glusterfs static files of Apache document root (/var/www/html) will be replicated across these machines. Follow the below steps to achieve this.

Step 1: Enable the epel repository on both the nodes:

# yum -y install http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Step 2: Enable GlusterFS repository on both the nodes:

# wget -P /etc/yum.repos.d http://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/LATEST/EPEL.repo/glusterfs-epel.repo

Step 3: Install all the necessary packages using yum on both the nodes:

# yum -y install pyxattr python-webob1.0 python-paste-deploy1.5 python-sphinx10 git autoconf automake bison dos2unix flex fuse-devel libaio-devel libibverbs-devel libtool libxml2-devel lvm2-devel make openssl-devel pkgconfig python-devel python-eventlet python-netifaces python-paste-deploy python-simplejson python-sphinx python-webob readline-devel rpm-build systemtap-sdt-devel tar

Step 4: Install the GlusterFS software on both the nodes:

# yum install glusterfs{-fuse,-server}
# yum install xfsdump xfsprogs

Step 5: Start GlusterFS service on both the nodes:

# /etc/init.d/glusterd start ; chkconfig glusterd on

Step 6: Add fuse module to Linux core for GlusterFS client on both the nodes:

# /sbin/modprobe fuse

To make it work after restart of server:

# echo "modprobe fuse" > /etc/sysconfig/modules/fuse.modules
# chmod +x /etc/sysconfig/modules/fuse.modules

Step 7: Add both nodes on trusted storage:

– On ‘site1.thegeekdiary.com’, run below command:

# gluster peer probe site2.thegeekdiary.com

On ‘Site2.thegeekdiary.com’, run below command:

# gluster peer probe site1.thegeekdiary.com
Note: If we are using firewall, make sure TCP ports 111, 24007, 24008, 24009 are open on site1.thegeekdiary.com and site2.thegeekdiary.com.

To Check status of trusted storage, use below command:

# glusterfs peer status

Step 8: Create the below directory on both nodes.

#  mkdir -p /opt/gfs-data

On Master Node, site1.thegeekdiary.com, run below command:

# gluster volume create apache replica 2 site1.thegeekdiary.com:/opt/gfs-data site2.thegeekdiary.com:/opt/gfs-data

Step 9: Now start the volume on both the nodes.

# gluster volume start apache

Now Mount volumes on site1.thegeekdiary.com:

# mount.glusterfs site1.thegeekdiary.com:/apache /var/www/html

Also Mount the Volume on site2.thegeekdiary.com:

# mount.glusterfs site2.thegeekdiary:/apache /var/www/html

For the Permanent Mount add below entry in the /etc/fstab file.

site1.thegeekdiary.com:/apache   /var/www/html  glusterfs defaults,_netdev 0 0

Step 10: Testing of file replications.
Go To /var/www/html folders, modify the files from ‘site1.thegeekdiary.com’ check whether the changes are reflected on another node ‘site2.thegeekdiary.com’.

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