NAME¶
sheepfs - A pseudo file system exports both Sheepdog's internal state as well as
Sheepdog's storage
SYNOPSIS¶
sheepfs [OPTION]... MOUNTPOINT
DESCRIPTION¶
sheepfs - Sheepdog is a distributed storage system for QEMU. It provides
highly available block level storage volumes to virtual machines. Sheepdog
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.
The server daemon is called
sheep(8). A command line utility is available via
dog(8). A pseudo file system is available via
sheepfs(8). QEMU virtual
machines use the sheep daemon via a block driver available in qemu(1).
Sheepfs is a FUSE-based pseudo file system in userland to access both Sheepdog's
internal state (for e.g, cluster info, vdi list) as well as Sheepdog's high
reliable storage.
The idea here is that its sometimes useful that we can envision our interaction
with an Sheepdog's object in terms of a directory structure and filesystem
operations.
People might be mostly interested into sheepfs's volume directory, which export
VM's volume as a pseudo block file in your local file system hierarchy, which
can be used as
1. a big file abstraction, which is actually backed by Sheepdog's storage,
distributed in the cluster.
2. a loop device file, which you can mount wherever you want to use it as a file
system backed up by Sheepdog.
3. a loop device file for some VM's image, which you want to access(RW) its
internal data.
4. storage media for other hypervisor, such as XEN
This file abstraction integrates well into kernel's pagecache.
OPTIONS¶
- -a, --address
- specify the sheep address (default: 127.0.0.1)
- -d, --debug
- enable debug output (implies -f)
- -f, --foreground
- sheepfs run in the foreground
- -k, --pagecache
- use local kernel's page cache to access volume
- -o, --objectcache
- enable object cache of the connected sheep daemon
- -p, --port
- specify the sheep port (default: 7000)
- -h, --help
- display this help and exit
DEPENDENCIES¶
Sheepdog requires QEMU 0.13.z or later and Corosync 1.y.z.
FILES¶
none
SEE ALSO¶
sheep(8), dog(8), qemu(1), corosync_overview(8)
AUTHORS¶
This software is developed by the Sheepdog community which may be reached via
mailing list at <sheepdog@lists.wpkg.org>.