Features/Sheepdog
Summary
A distributed storage system for QEMU
Owner
- Name: Kazutaka Morita
- Email: morita.kazutaka@lab.ntt.co.jp
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.
Getting Started
Status
- QEMU 0.13 provides built-in support for sheepdog block devices.
- The latest sever code is available on the following git tree
TODOs
generic items
- add more documentation for users
- add more documentation for developers
- add testing tools to avoid regressions
- output better debug and error messages
- support architectures other than X86_64, i386
sheep
- handle connection timeout
- scalability upto several hundreds nodes
- better data re-balancing
- remove data objects which are no longer used
- provide different redundancy levels for each VDI
- handle network partition failure
- remove limitation of the number of VMs on the same host
- better load balancing, performance
collie
- provide a machine parsable format option
- show differences between VDIs to backup efficiently
qemu block driver
- support live migration
- support snapshot deletion
- support a variable object size
- support shrinking image size