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Chapter 1. Introduction to Red Hat Gluster Storage for Virtualization
Red Hat provides a way to create and optimize Red Hat Gluster Storage volumes using the Red Hat Virtualization Manager. Red Hat Virtualization platform and Red Hat Gluster Storage platform comprise various components that work seamlessly together, enabling system administrators to install, configure, and manage a virtualized environment using Red Hat Gluster Storage as the virtual machine image store.
Red Hat Gluster Storage provides a POSIX-compatible file system that allows you to store virtual machine images in a Red Hat Gluster Storage Server cluster instead of network-attached storage (NAS) appliances or a storage area network (SAN) array.
From version 3.3 onward, Red Hat Virtualization supports the use of POSIX-compliant file systems for storage. Red Hat Gluster Storage provides a POSIX-compatible file system in which you can create Red Hat Gluster Storage volumes as storage domains.
Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat Gluster Storage integration consists of:
- Red Hat Virtualization nodes.See the Red Hat Virtualization Technical Reference for an architectural overview: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_virtualization/4.1/html/technical_reference/
- Red Hat Gluster Storage nodes.A Red Hat Gluster Storage environment consists of bricks that are used to build volumes. Different types of optimized storage volumes can be used as virtual machine stores to hold resources such as virtual disks, templates, and snapshots.
The following diagram illustrates Red Hat Virtualization integration with Red Hat Gluster Storage:
Figure 1.1. Integration architecture
Important
In Red Hat Virtualization 3.3 and later, the GlusterFS storage domain uses the same access mechanism as the POSIXFS domain. The GlusterFS storage domain is introduced to support the
libgfapi protocol in the future releases.
