OpenNebula: Native GlusterFS Image Access for KVM Drivers
If you saw our Gluster Spotlight (“Integration Nation”) last week, you’ll recall that Javi and Jaime from the OpenNebula project were discussing their recent advances with GlusterFS and libgfapi access. Here’s a post where they go into some detail about it:
The good news is that for some time now qemu and libvirt have native support for GlusterFS. This makes possible for VMs running from images stored in Gluster to talk directly with its servers making the IO much faster.
In this case, they use GFAPI for direct virtual machine access in addition to the FUSE-based GlusterFS client mount for image registration as an example of using the best tool for a particular job. As they explain, OpenNebula administrators expect a mounted, POSIX filesystem for many operations, so the FUSE-based mount fits best with their workflow while GFAPI works when lower latency and better performance are called for.
The GFAPI integration is slated for the 4.6 release of OpenNebula. To get an early look at the code, check out their Git repository. Documentation is available here.