Features/Sheepdog

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Summary

A distributed storage system for QEMU

Owner

Detailed Summary

Sheepdog is a distributed storage system for QEMU. It provides highly available block level storage volumes that can be attached to QEMU-based virtual machines. Sheepdog scales to several hundreds nodes, and supports advanced volume management features such as snapshot, cloning, and thin provisioning.

The architecture of Sheepdog is fully symmetric; there is no central node such as a meta-data server. This design enables following features.

Linear scalability in performance and capacity When more performance or capacity is needed, Sheepdog can be grown linearly by simply adding new machines to the cluster.

No single point of failure Even if a machine fails, the data is still accessible through other machines.

Easy administration There is no configuration file that defines the cluster's members or roles. When the `sheep` daemon is run on a new machine, Sheepdog will automatically detect the machine via multicast and will add it as a member of the cluster.

Status

  • QEMU 0.13 provides built-in support for sheepdog block devices.

External documentation

Links