I am happy to announce the General Availability of Gluster 4.0 for CentOS 6 on x86_64. These packages are following the upstream Gluster Community releases, and will receive monthly bugfix updates.
Gluster 4.0 is a Short-Term-Maintenance release, and will only receive updates until the next version (4.1) becomes available. The difference between Long-Term-Maintenance and Short-Term-Maintenance releases is explained on the Gluster release schedule page: https://www.gluster.org/community/release-schedule/
With this release, there is no glusterfs-server available for CentOS 6 anymore. The server component is now only available for CentOS 7. Users with storage servers on CentOS 6 can stay on Gluster 3.12 for a while longer, see the release schedule linked above for the date that Gluster 3.12 becomes End-Of-Life. It is recommended to plan an upgrade of the storage servers to CentOS 7 and newer Gluster versions in the next few months.
Users of CentOS 6 can now simply install Gluster 4.0 with only these two commands:
# yum install centos-release-gluster40 # yum install glusterfs-client
The centos-release-gluster40 package is delivered via CentOS Extras repos. This contains all the metadata and dependancy information, needed to install Gluster 4.0.
Note that the standard centos-release-gluster (virtual) package is still available and points to the 3.12 version. This is intentional because 3.12 is a Long-Term-Maintenance version and does not require users to update the major versions avery couple of months. Some deployments may need to install the centos-release-gluster package as well as centos-release-gluster40 to fullfill dependencies for other projects.
We have a quickstart guide specifically built around the packages are available, it makes for a good introduction to Gluster and will help get you started in just a few simple steps, this quick start is available at https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Storage/gluster-Quickstart
More details about the packages that the Gluster project provides in the Storage SIG is available in the documentation: https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Storage/Gluster
The centos-release-gluster* repositories offer additional packages that enhance the usability of Gluster itself. Utilities and tools that were working with previous versions of Gluster are expected to stay working fine. If there are any proboems, or requests for additional tools and applications to be provided, just send us an email with your suggestions. The current list of packages that is (planned to become) available can be found here: https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Storage/Gluster/Ecosystem-pkgs
We welcome all feedback, comments and contributions. You can get in touch with the CentOS Storage SIG on the centos-devel mailing list ( https://lists.centos.org ) and with the Gluster developer and user communities at https://www.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo , we are also available on irc at #gluster on irc.freenode.net, and on twitter at @gluster .
Cheers, Niels de Vos Storage SIG member & Gluster maintainer