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Chapter 3. Hosting Virtual Machine Images on Red Hat Storage volumes
Red Hat Storage provides a POSIX-compatible file system to store virtual machine images in Red Hat Storage volumes.
This chapter describes how to configure volumes using the command line interface, and how to prepare Red Hat Storage servers for virtualization using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager.
3.1. Configuring Volumes Using the Command Line Interface
Red Hat recommends configuring volumes before starting them. For information on creating volumes, see Setting up Red Hat Storage Volumes in the Red Hat Storage Administration Guide.
Procedure 3.1. To Configure Volumes Using the Command Line Interface
- Configure the Red Hat Storage volume using the following command:
#
gluster volume set VOLNAME group virtImportant
After tagging the volume asgroup virt, use the volume for storing virtual machine images only and always access the volume through the glusterFS native client. - The
gluster volume set <VOLNAME> group virtcommand configures the specified volume using the settings in the/var/lib/glusterd/groups/virtfile. The following settings are the recommended defaults:quick-read=off read-ahead=off io-cache=off stat-prefetch=off eager-lock=enable remote-dio=on quorum-type=auto server-quorum-type=server
Important
When you upgrade to Red Hat Storage 3, a new virt file is created in/var/lib/glusterd/groups/virt.rpmnew. Ensure to apply the newvirtfile on the existing volumes by renaming thevirt.rpmnewfile tovirt, along with the customized settings.All the performance-related settings other thancluster.eager-lockprevent caching within GlusterFS client stack, as it is the preferred mode for attaching disks to a virtual machine. Thecluster.eager-lockoption optimizes write performance with synchronous replication when there is a single writer to a file. For description on each of these performance-related settings, see chapter Configuring Volume Options in the Red Hat Storage Administration Guide.Note
Server-Side and Client-Side Quorum are enabled by default in the/var/lib/glusterd/groups/virtfile to minimize split-brain scenarios. If Server-Side Quorum is not met, then the Red Hat Storage volumes become unavailable causing the Virtual Machines (VMs) to move to a paused state. If Client-Side Quorum is not met, although a replica pair in a Red Hat Storage volume is available in the read-only mode, the VMs move to a paused state.Manual intervention is required to make the VMs resume the operations after the quorum is restored. Consistency is achieved at the cost of fault tolerance. If fault tolerance is preferred over consistency, disable server-side and client-side quorum with the commands:# gluster volume reset <vol-name> server-quorum-type # gluster volume reset <vol-name> quorum-type
For more information on these configuration settings, see Managing Red Hat Storage Volumes in the Red Hat Storage Administration Guide. - Set the brick permissions for
vdsmandkvm. If you do not set the required brick permissions, creation of virtual machines fails.- Set the user and group permissions using the following commands:
# gluster volume set VOLNAME storage.owner-uid 36 # gluster volume set VOLNAME storage.owner-gid 36
- If you are using QEMU/KVM as a hypervisor, set the user and group permissions using the following commands:
# gluster volume set VOLNAME storage.owner-uid 107 # gluster volume set VOLNAME storage.owner-gid 107

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