Testing GlusterFS during “Glusterfest”

The GlusterFS community is having a “test day”. Puppet-Gluster+Vagrant is a great tool to help with this, and it has now been patched to support alpha, beta, qa, and rc releases! Because it was built so well (*cough*, shameless plug), it only took one patch.

Okay, first make sure that your Puppet-Gluster+Vagrant setup is working properly. I have only tested this on Fedora 20. Please read:

Automatically deploying GlusterFS with Puppet-Gluster+Vagrant!

to make sure you’re comfortable with the tools and infrastructure.

This weekend we’re testing 3.5.0 beta1. It turns out that the full rpm version for this is:

3.5.0-0.1.beta1.el6

You can figure out these strings yourself by browsing the folders in:

https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/qa-releases/

To test a specific version, use the --gluster-version argument that I added to the vagrant command. For this deployment, here is the list of commands that I used:

$ mkdir /tmp/vagrant/
$ cd /tmp/vagrant/
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-gluster.git
$ cd vagrant/gluster/
$ vagrant up puppet
$ sudo -v && vagrant up --gluster-version='3.5.0-0.1.beta1.el6' --gluster-count=2 --no-parallel

As you can see, this is a standard vagrant deploy. I’ve decided to build two gluster hosts (--gluster-count=2) and I’m specifying the version string shown above. I’ve also decided to build in series (--no-parallel) because I think there might be some hidden race conditions, possibly in the vagrant-libvirt stack.

After about five minutes, the two hosts were built, and about six minutes after that, Puppet-Gluster had finished doing its magic. I had logged in to watch the progress, but if you were out getting a coffee, when you came back you could run:

$ gluster volume info

to see your newly created volume!

If you want to try a different version or host count, you don’t need to destroy the entire infrastructure. You can destroy the gluster annex hosts:

$ vagrant destroy annex{1..2}

and then run a new vagrant up command.

In addition, I’ve added a --gluster-firewall option. Currently it defaults to false because there’s a strange firewall bug blocking my VRRP (keepalived) setup. If you’d like to enable it and help me fix this bug, you can use:

--gluster-firewall=true

To make sure the firewall is off, you can use:

--gluster-firewall=false

In the future, I will change the default value to true, so specify it explicitly if you need a certain behaviour.

Happy hacking,

James