GL636 · 4 days · 4+ hrs hands-on labs

GlusterFS Storage Administration

Available for RHEL

Build and administer petabyte-scale GlusterFS distributed storage clusters on commodity hardware. This course takes storage professionals from initial installation and brick preparation through advanced topics including geo-replication, high availability, and OpenStack Swift object storage integration, providing the depth needed to confidently manage GlusterFS in production environments.

The curriculum covers GlusterFS architecture and its metadata-free elastic hash design, brick preparation with LVM thin provisioning and XFS, and all nine volume types including distributed, replicated, striped, sharded, and dispersed configurations. Students configure geo-replication for disaster recovery across LAN, WAN, and Internet links, set up multi-protocol client access via FUSE, NFS, and CIFS/SMB, implement POSIX ACLs and directory quotas, deploy CTDB for IP failover with Samba, manage volume snapshots, and integrate with OpenStack Swift for unified file and object storage.

Lab exercises reinforce key concepts with multi-node GlusterFS clusters, covering brick creation, volume type deployment, and geo-replication configuration. Troubleshooting chapters equip students with statedump analysis, log interpretation, and systematic approaches to diagnosing geo-replication and NFS issues.

Who Should Attend

Storage administrators, system administrators, and infrastructure engineers responsible for deploying and managing scalable distributed storage who want to gain practical skills in GlusterFS volume management, replication, and high availability.

Skills You'll Gain

Install and configure GlusterFS on enterprise Linux systems
Create and manage bricks using LVM thin provisioning and XFS
Deploy distributed, replicated, dispersed, and sharded volume types
Configure geo-replication for disaster recovery across sites
Manage volume operations including expansion, shrinking, data migration, and rebalancing
Configure FUSE, NFS, and CIFS/SMB client access to GlusterFS volumes
Implement POSIX ACLs and directory-based disk quotas on GlusterFS volumes
Deploy CTDB for IP failover and high availability with Samba integration
Integrate GlusterFS with OpenStack Swift for unified file and object storage
Create, manage, and restore GlusterFS volume snapshots using LVM thin volumes
Troubleshoot GlusterFS volumes using statedumps, logs, and status commands
Configure self-healing and bitrot detection for data integrity

Chapters & Labs

5 labs · 4+ hours hands-on
  1. Introduction 2 labs · 35 min
  2. Installation 1 lab · 60 min
  3. Volume Types 1 lab · 45 min
  4. Geo-Replication 1 lab · 45 min
  5. Managing Volumes
  6. GlusterFS Clients
  7. ACLs and Quotas
  8. IP Failover
  9. United File and Object Storage
  10. Troubleshooting

Prerequisites

Familiarity with Linux command-line administration, LVM, XFS filesystems, and basic networking concepts. Experience with enterprise Linux systems administration (GL250 or equivalent) is recommended.