Chapter 1. Introduction to Red Hat Gluster Storage for Virtualization

Red Hat provides a way to create and optimize Red Hat Gluster Storage volumes using Red Hat Virtualization Manager. Red Hat Virtualization platform and Red Hat Gluster Storage work together to allow system administrators to install, configure, and manage a virtualized environment using Red Hat Gluster Storage as the virtual machine image store.

Red Hat Gluster Storage provides a POSIX-compatible file system that allows you to store virtual machine images in a Red Hat Gluster Storage Server cluster instead of network-attached storage (NAS) appliances or a storage area network (SAN) array.

Red Hat Virtualization 3.3 and later versions support the use of POSIX-compliant file systems for storage. Red Hat Gluster Storage provides a POSIX-compatible file system in which you can create Red Hat Gluster Storage volumes as storage domains.

Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat Gluster Storage integration consists of:

The following diagram illustrates Red Hat Virtualization integration with Red Hat Gluster Storage: