Submitted by “Sheepdog is a new third party open source project around kvm providing distributed storage management features. Sheepdog provides high availability to kvm guests by providing block level storage volumes to virtual machines similar to Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage). In fact one of the items on the sheepdog project todo list is to support the Amazon EBS API. Sheepdog is designed to scale to hundreds of nodes. You can think of this technique as striping your virtual disk data across multiple nodes similar to what raid does. The project is still very early in its development cycle but already provides basic functionality.”
How is this different from any of the other distributed file systems out there. Nice to see them building in support for what Amazon is doing, but will this project make much of a difference?
It’s specifically for virtual machines. You store disk images in it, rather than individual files. It’s basically a big distributed RAID-like system for VM disk images.