Are you looking for a way to add arbiter brick in Gluster?

We can help you to create an arbiter volume. Alternatively, we will also see how to add an arbiter brick to a replicated volume.

Arbiter volume is a subset of replicated volume. Usually, we use this for better consistency and disk space minimization.

At Bobcares, we often get requests to manage Gluster volume, as a part of our Infrastructure Management Services.

Today, let’s see how our Support Engineers do this.

What is Gluster arbiter brick?

In Gluster a logical collection of brick is known as Volume. So let’s have a look at arbiter volume first.

Arbiter volume is a three-way replicated volume. And arbiter brick is a special brick that does not store data. Rather it stores other details like file names, metadata and so on. The main purpose of arbiter volume is to prevent split-brains and provide the same consistency without consuming more space.

The size of the arbiter brick can be smaller than the data bricks. Every third brick in three replica volume is arbiter brick.

How to create arbiter volume?

There are two possible ways to create an arbiter volume. That is, either by creating it or by converting an existing replicated volume to arbiter volume. And here is how our Support Engineers do this.

To create a new arbiter volume

Firstly, let’s create an arbiter volume afresh. And the command to add this is,

gluster volume create <VOL_NAME> replica 3 arbiter 1 host1:brick1 host2:brick2 host3:brick3

This command creates a volume with one arbiter brick for three replicate bricks.

Later, on checking the volume info, it appears as,

To add an arbiter brick to replicated volume

We can also convert an already existing two-way replicated volume to arbiter volume. Usually, our Support Engineers do this by adding an arbiter brick to replicated volume.

So to add a brick to an existing replicated volume, we use the command,

gluster volume add-brick <VOL_NAME> replica 3 arbiter 1 host:arbiter-brick-path

Here we add a brick to an existing volume. And specify the path of the arbiter brick.

Hence this successfully converts the existing volume to an arbiter volume.

[Need assistance in managing Gluster volume? – We are here to help you.]

Conclusion

So far, we saw how to add arbiter brick in Gluster. We also saw how to create an arbiter volume and convert an existing replicated volume to arbiter volume by adding an arbiter brick. In today’s writeup, we saw how our Support Engineers do this.