Vitastor may be installed in Docker/Podman. In such setups etcd, monitors and OSD all run in containers, but everything else looks as close as possible to a usual setup with packages:

  • host network is used
  • auto-start is implemented through udev and systemd
  • logs are written to journald (not docker json log files)
  • command-line wrapper scripts are installed to the host system to call vitastor-disk, vitastor-cli and others through the container

Such installations may be useful when it’s impossible or inconvenient to install Vitastor from packages, for example, in exotic Linux distributions.

If you don’t want just a simple containerized installation, you can also take a look at Vitastor Kubernetes operator: https://github.com/Antilles7227/vitastor-operator

Installing Containers

The instruction is very simple.

  1. Download a Docker image of the desired version:
    docker pull vitastor:1.10.2
  2. Install scripts to the host system:
    docker run --rm -it -v /etc:/host-etc -v /usr/bin:/host-bin vitastor:1.10.2 install.sh
  3. Reload udev rules:
    udevadm control --reload-rules

And you can return to Quick Start.

Upgrading Containers

First make sure to check the topic Upgrading Vitastor to figure out if you need any additional steps.

Then, to upgrade a containerized installation, you just need to change the VITASTOR_VERSION option in /etc/vitastor/docker.conf and restart all Vitastor services:

systemctl restart vitastor.target

QEMU

Vitastor Docker image also contains QEMU, qemu-img and qemu-storage-daemon built with Vitastor support.

However, running QEMU in Docker is harder to setup and it depends on the used virtualization UI (OpenNebula, Proxmox and so on). Some of them also required patched Libvirt.

That’s why containerized installation of Vitastor doesn’t contain a ready-made QEMU setup and it’s recommended to install QEMU from packages or build it manually.

fio

Vitastor Docker image also contains fio and installs a wrapper called vitastor-fio to use it from the host system.