GlusterFS 3.8 Released

Gluster.org announces the release of 3.8 on June 14, 2016, marking a decade of active development.

The 3.8 release focuses on:

containers with inclusion of Heketi
hyperconvergence
ecosystem integration
protocol improvements with NFS Ganesha

Contributed features are marked with the supporting organizations.

• Automatic conflict resolution, self-healing improvements (Facebook)
  • Synchronous Replication receives a major boost with features contributed from Facebook. Multi-threaded self-healing makes self-heal perform at a faster rate than before. Automatic Conflict resolution ensures that conflicts due to network partitions are handled without the need for administrative intervention

• NFSv4.1 (Ganesha) – protocol
  • Gluster’s native NFSv3 server is disabled by default with this release. Gluster’s integration with NFS Ganesha provides NFS v3, v4 and v4.1 accesses to data stored in Gluster volume.

• BareOS – backup / data protection
  • Gluster 3.8 is ready for integration with BareOS 16.2. BareOS 16.2 leverages glusterfind for intelligently backing up objects stored in a Gluster volume.

• “Next generation” tiering and sharding – VM images
  • Sharding is now stable for VM image storage. Geo-replication has been enhanced to integrate with sharding for offsite backup/disaster recovery of VM images. Self-healing and data tiering with sharding makes it an excellent candidate for hyperconverged virtual machine image storage.

• block device & iSCSI with LIO – containers
  • File backed block devices are usable from Gluster through iSCSI. This release of Gluster integrates with tcmu-runner [https://github.com/agrover/tcmu-runner] to access block devices natively through libgfapi.

• Heketi – containers, dynamic provisioning
  • Heketi provides the ability to dynamically provision Gluster volumes without administrative intervention. Heketi can manage multiple Gluster clusters and will be the cornerstone for integration with Container and Storage as a Service management ecosystems.

• glusterfs-coreutils (Facebook) – containers
  • Native coreutils for Gluster developed by Facebook that uses libgfapi to interact with gluster volumes. Useful for systems and containers that do not have FUSE.

For more details, our release notes are included: https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/blob/release-3.8/doc/release-notes/3.8.0.md

The release of 3.8 also marks the end of life for GlusterFS 3.5, there will no further updates for this version.