[Gluster-devel] GlusterFS QEMU libgfapi

[John Mark Walker]

Greetings, CloudStackers. I noticed there was a question re: libgfapi as it pertains to libvirt and QEMU.

As of last January/February, all new versions of the KVM/QEMU/libvirt/oVirt virtualization stack have been "glusterized" and use the libgfapi client library when you specify the gluster protocol in QEMU. 

You can see this old presentation here that goes over some of these topics: http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/images/9/9d/QEMU_GlusterFS.pdf

That presentation is almost a year old and much of what was listed as in-progress is now in an official release. 

What this integration means for you is that you should be able to spin up and manage VM images on Gluster volumes directly through libgfapi, which bypasses the fuse mount. This is especially useful for use cases such as VM image hosting, and the performance gains are pretty dramatic. 

I've CC'd the Gluster-devel list, as well as some of the engineers who were working on the integration. If you have specific questions, make sure to keep gluster-devel on the CC list so that they can respond.

Thanks!
John Mark Walker
Gluster Community Leader