Description
MooseFS is a fault tolerant, highly available, highly performing, easily scalable, network distributed file system. It spreads data over several physical commodity servers, which are visible to the user as one resource. It can handle petabytes of data. For standard file operations MooseFS acts like any other Unix-like file system:
* A hierarchical structure (directory tree)
* Stores POSIX file attributes (permissions, last access and modification times)
* Supports special files (block and character devices, pipes and sockets)
* Symbolic links (file names pointing to target files, not necessarily on MooseFS) and hard links (different names of files which refer to the same data on MooseFS)
Distinctive features of MooseFS are:
* High availability (i.e. redundant metadata servers)
* High reliability (several copies of the data can be stored on separate computers)
* Capacity is dynamically expandable by simply adding new computers/disks
* Deleted files are retained for a configurable period of time (a file system level "trash bin")
* Coherent snapshots of files, even while the file is being written/accessed
* Data tiering - Storage Classes
* Supports POSIX locks and *BSD flock locks
* Stores POSIX ACLs
* Access to the file system can be limited based on IP address and/or password
MooseFS alternatives and similar tools
Based on the "Distributed Filesystems" category.
Alternatively, view MooseFS alternatives based on common mentions on social networks and blogs.
-
SeaweedFS
DISCONTINUED. SeaweedFS is a fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files, and data lake, for billions of files! Blob store has O(1) disk seek, cloud tiering. Filer supports Cloud Drive, cross-DC active-active replication, Kubernetes, POSIX FUSE mount, S3 API, S3 Gateway, Hadoop, WebDAV, encryption, Erasure Coding. [Moved to: https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs] -
Alluxio (formerly Tachyon)
Alluxio, data orchestration for analytics and machine learning in the cloud -
Camlistore
Perkeep (née Camlistore) is your personal storage system for life: a way of storing, syncing, sharing, modelling and backing up content. -
Minio
Minio is an open source object storage server compatible with Amazon S3 APIs. (Source Code) Apache-2.0 Go -
Lustre
A type of parallel distributed file system, generally used for large-scale cluster computing.
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README
MooseFS – A Petabyte Distributed File System
MooseFS is a Petabyte Open Source Network Distributed File System. It is easy to deploy and maintain, highly reliable, fault tolerant, highly performing, easily scalable and POSIX compliant.
MooseFS spreads data over a number of commodity servers, which are visible to the user as one resource. For standard file operations MooseFS acts like ordinary Unix-like file system:
- A hierarchical structure – directory tree
- Stores POSIX file attributes – permissions, last access and modification times, etc.
- Supports ACLs
- Supports POSIX and BSD file locks – including support for distributed file locking
- Supports special files – block and character devices, pipes and sockets
- Supports symbolic links – file names pointing to target files, not necessarily on MooseFS
- Supports hard links – different names of files which refer to the same data on MooseFS
Distinctive MooseFS features:
- High reliability – files are stored in several copies on separate servers. The number of copies is a configurable parameter, even per each file
- No Single Point of Failure – all hardware and software components may be redundant
- Parallel data operations – many clients can access many files concurrently
- Capacity can be dynamically expanded by simply adding new servers/disks on the fly
- Retired hardware may be removed on the fly
- Deleted files are retained for a configurable period of time (a file system level "trash bin")
- Coherent, "atomic" snapshots of files, even while the files are being written/accessed
- Access to the file system can be limited based on IP address and/or password (similarly as in NFS)
- Data tiering – supports different storage policies for different files/directories in Storage Classes mechanism
- Per-directory, "project" quotas – configurable per RAW space, usable space, number of inodes with hard and soft quotas support
- Apart from file system storage, MooseFS also provides block storage (
mfsbdev
) - Efficient, pure C implementation
- Ethernet support
Supported platforms
MooseFS can be installed on any POSIX compliant operating system including various Linux distributions, FreeBSD and macOS:
- Ubuntu
- Debian
- RHEL / CentOS
- OpenSUSE
- FreeBSD
- macOS
- Raspbian – Raspberry Pi 3
MooseFS Linux Client uses FUSE. MooseFS macOS Client uses FUSE for macOS.
There is a separate MooseFS Client for Microsoft Windows available, built on top of Dokany.
Getting started
You can install MooseFS using your favourite package manager on one of the following platforms using officially supported repositories:
- Ubuntu 16 / 18 / 20
- Debian 8 / 9 / 10
- RHEL / CentOS 7 / 8
- FreeBSD 11 / 12
- macOS 10.11+
- Raspbian 8 / 9 – Raspberry Pi 3
Packages for Ubuntu 14 and CentOS 6 are also available, but no longer supported.
Minimal set of packages, which are needed to run MooseFS:
moosefs-master
MooseFS Master Server for metadata servers,moosefs-chunkserver
MooseFS Chunkserver for data storage servers,moosefs-client
MooseFS Client – client side package to mount the filesystem.
Source code
Feel free to download the source code from our GitHub code repository!
Install the following dependencies before building MooseFS from sources:
- Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt install build-essential libpcap-dev zlib1g-dev libfuse3-dev pkg-config
(if you don't have FUSE v. 3 in your system, usesudo apt install build-essential libpcap-dev zlib1g-dev libfuse-dev pkg-config
) - CentOS/RHEL:
sudo yum install gcc make libpcap-devel zlib-devel fuse3-devel pkgconfig
(if you don't have FUSE v. 3 in your system, usesudo yum install gcc make libpcap-devel zlib-devel fuse-devel pkgconfig
)
Recommended packages:
- Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt install fuse3
(if you don't have FUSE v. 3 in your system, usesudo apt install fuse
) - CentOS/RHEL:
sudo yum install fuse3
(if you don't have FUSE v. 3 in your system, usesudo yum install fuse
)
Building MooseFS on Linux can be easily done by running ./linux_build.sh
. Similarly, use ./freebsd_build.sh
in order to build MooseFS on FreeBSD and respectively ./macosx_build.sh
on macOS. Remember that these scripts do not install binaries (i.e. do not run make install
) at the end. Run this command manually.
Minimal setup
Just three steps to have MooseFS up and running:
1. Install at least one Master Server
- Install
moosefs-master
package - Prepare default config (as
root
):cd /etc/mfs cp mfsmaster.cfg.sample mfsmaster.cfg cp mfsexports.cfg.sample mfsexports.cfg
- Prepare the metadata file (as
root
):cd /var/lib/mfs cp metadata.mfs.empty metadata.mfs chown mfs:mfs metadata.mfs rm metadata.mfs.empty
- Run Master Server (as
root
):mfsmaster start
- Make this machine visible under
mfsmaster
name, e.g. by adding a DNS entry (recommended) or by adding it in/etc/hosts
on all servers that run any of MooseFS components.
2. Install at least two Chunkservers
- Install
moosefs-chunkserver
package - Prepare default config (as
root
):cd /etc/mfs cp mfschunkserver.cfg.sample mfschunkserver.cfg cp mfshdd.cfg.sample mfshdd.cfg
At the end of
mfshdd.cfg
file make one or more entries containing paths to HDDs / partitions designated for storing chunks, e.g.:/mnt/chunks1 /mnt/chunks2 /mnt/chunks3
It is recommended to use XFS as an underlying filesystem for disks designated to store chunks. More than two Chunkservers are strongly recommended.
Change the ownership and permissions to
mfs:mfs
to above mentioned locations:chown mfs:mfs /mnt/chunks1 /mnt/chunks2 /mnt/chunks3 chmod 770 /mnt/chunks1 /mnt/chunks2 /mnt/chunks3
Start the Chunkserver:
mfschunkserver start
Repeat steps above for second (third, ...) Chunkserver.
3. Client side: mount MooseFS filesystem
- Install
moosefs-client
package Mount MooseFS (as
root
):mkdir /mnt/mfs mount -t moosefs mfsmaster: /mnt/mfs
or:
mfsmount -H mfsmaster /mnt/mfs
if the above method is not supported by your systemYou can also add an
/etc/fstab
entry to mount MooseFS during the system boot:mfsmaster: /mnt/mfs moosefs defaults,mfsdelayedinit 0 0
There are more configuration parameters available but most of them may stay with defaults. We do our best to keep MooseFS easy to deploy and maintain.
MooseFS, for testing purposes, can even be installed on a single machine!
Additional tools
Setting up moosefs-cli
or moosefs-cgi
with moosefs-cgiserv
is also recommended – it gives you a possibility to monitor the cluster online:
- Install
moosefs-cli moosefs-cgi moosefs-cgiserv
packages (they are typically set up on the Master Server) - Run MooseFS CGI Server (as
root
):mfscgiserv start
- Open http://mfsmaster:9425 in your web browser
It is also strongly recommended to set up at least one Metalogger on a different machine than Master Server (e.g. on one of Chunkservers). Metalogger constantly synchronizes and backups the metadata:
- Install
moosefs-metalogger
package - Prepare default config (as
root
):cd /etc/mfs cp mfsmetalogger.cfg.sample mfsmetalogger.cfg
- Run Metalogger (as
root
):mfsmetalogger start
Refer to installation guides for more details.
Some facts
- Date of the first public release: 2008-05-30
- The project web site: https://moosefs.com
- Installation and using MooseFS: https://moosefs.com/support
- (Old) Sourceforge project site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/moosefs
Contact us
- Reporting bugs: GitHub issue or [email protected]
- General: [email protected]
Copyright
Copyright (c) 2008-2021 Jakub Kruszona-Zawadzki, Core Technology Sp. z o.o.
This file is part of MooseFS.
MooseFS is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 2 (only).
MooseFS is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with MooseFS; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02111-1301, USA or visit http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html.
*Note that all licence references and agreements mentioned in the MooseFS README section above
are relevant to that project's source code only.