I had to do yesterday some maintenance yesterday on our Gluster nodes used within CentOS.org infra. Basically I had to reconfigure some gluster volumes to use Infiniband instead of Ethernet. (I'll write a dedicated blog post about that migration later).

While a lot of people directly consume packages from Gluster.org (for example http://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/3.6/LATEST/CentOS/epel-6/x86_64/), you'll be able (soon) to also install directly those packages on CentOS, through packages built by the Storage SIG. At the moment I'm writing this blog post, gluster 3.6.1 packages are built and available on our Community Build Server Koji setup , but still in testing (and unsigned).

"But wait, there are already glusterfs packages tagged 3.6 in CentOS 6.6, right ? " will you say. Well, yes, but not the full stack. What you see in the [base] (or [updates]) repository are the client packages, as for example a base CentOS 6.x can be a gluster client (through fuse, or libgfapi - really interesting to speed up qemu-kvm instead of using the default fuse mount point ..) , but the -server package isn't there. So the reason why you can either use the upstream gluster.org yum repositories or the Storage SIG one to have access to the full stack, and so run glusterd on CentOS.

Interested in testing those packages ? Wanting to test the update before those packages will be released by the Storage SIG ? here we go : http://cbs.centos.org/repos/storage6-testing/x86_64/os/Packages/ (packages available for CentOS 7 too)

By the way, if you never tested Gluster, it's really easy to setup and play with, even within Virtual Machines. Interesting reading : (quick start) : http://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Storage/gluster-Quickstart