Chapter 9. Managing Arbitrated Replicated Volumes

A standard replica 3 volume has the same sized bricks in each set, however, an arbiter volume will have one brick in the brick set that can be smaller than the data bricks.

In order to better optimize the sizing of the Arbiter brick, Heketi allows the user to provide an average file size value that is used to calculate the final size of the Arbiter brick. This is done using the volume option “user.heketi.average-file-size NUM” where NUM is an integer value in KiB. By default Heketi uses a value of 64KiB.

To create an arbiter volume with a custom average file size using the heketi-cli command line tool the volume options "user.heketi.arbiter true" and "user.heketi.average-file-size 1024" must be provided.

For example:

# heketi-cli volume create --size=4 --gluster-volume-options='user.heketi.arbiter true,user.heketi.average-file-size 1024'