GlusterFS 3.8 Released

[Amye Scavarda]

Gluster.org announces the release of 3.8 on June 14, 2016, marking a
decade of active development.


The 3.8 release focuses on:

containers with inclusion of Heketi
hyperconvergence
ecosystem integration
protocol improvements with NFS Ganesha


Contributed features are marked with the supporting organizations.


* Automatic conflict resolution, self-healing improvements (Facebook)

Synchronous Replication receives a major boost with features
contributed from Facebook. Multi-threaded self-healing makes self-heal
perform at a faster rate than before. Automatic Conflict resolution
ensures that conflicts due to network partitions are handled without
the need for administrative intervention

* NFSv4.1 (Ganesha) - protocol

Gluster’s native NFSv3 server is disabled by default with this
release. Gluster’s integration with NFS Ganesha provides NFS v3, v4
and v4.1 accesses to data stored in Gluster volume.

* BareOS - backup / data protection

Gluster 3.8 is ready for integration with BareOS 16.2. BareOS 16.2
leverages glusterfind for intelligently backing up objects stored in a
Gluster volume.

* "Next generation" tiering and sharding - VM images

Sharding is now stable for VM image storage. Geo-replication has been
enhanced to integrate with sharding for offsite backup/disaster
recovery of VM images. Self-healing and data tiering with sharding
makes it an excellent candidate for hyperconverged virtual machine
image storage.

* block device & iSCSI with LIO - containers

File backed block devices are usable from Gluster through iSCSI. This
release of Gluster integrates with tcmu-runner
[https://github.com/agrover/tcmu-runner] to access block devices
natively through libgfapi.

* Heketi - containers, dynamic provisioning

Heketi provides the ability to dynamically provision Gluster volumes
without administrative intervention. Heketi can manage multiple
Gluster clusters and will be the cornerstone for integration with
Container and Storage as a Service management ecosystems.

* glusterfs-coreutils (Facebook) - containers

Native coreutils for Gluster developed by Facebook that uses libgfapi
to interact with gluster volumes. Useful for systems and containers
that do not have FUSE.


For more details, our release notes are included:
https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/blob/release-3.8/doc/release-notes/3.8.0.md


The release of 3.8 also marks the end of life for GlusterFS 3.5, there
will no further updates for this version.


-- 
Amye Scavarda | amye at redhat.com | Gluster Community Lead