SHEEPDOG

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: 2021-01-29
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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

AUTHORS

This software is developed by the Sheepdog community which may be reached via mailing list at <sheepdog@lists.wpkg.org>.