Vitastor

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The Idea

Make Clustered Block Storage Fast Again.

Vitastor is a distributed block, file and object SDS, direct replacement of Ceph RBD, CephFS and RGW, and also internal SDS's of public clouds. However, in contrast to them, Vitastor is fast and simple at the same time. The only thing is it's slightly young :-).

Vitastor is architecturally similar to Ceph which means strong consistency, primary-replication, symmetric clustering and automatic data distribution over any number of drives of any size with configurable redundancy (replication or erasure codes/XOR).

Vitastor targets primarily SSD and SSD+HDD clusters with at least 10 Gbit/s network, supports TCP and RDMA and may achieve 4 KB read and write latency as low as ~0.1 ms with proper hardware which is ~10 times faster than other popular SDS's like Ceph or internal systems of public clouds.

Vitastor supports QEMU, UBLK, NBD, NFS protocols, OpenStack, OpenNebula, Proxmox, Kubernetes drivers. More drivers may be created easily.

Read more details in the documentation. You can start from here: Quick Start.

Talks and presentations

• KuberConf'2025: video
• Highload'2025: video, youtube, presentation (in Russian, in English)
• Highload'2022: presentation (in Russian), video
• DevOpsConf'2021: presentation (in Russian, in English), video

Documentation

• Introduction
  • Quick Start
  • Features
  • Architecture
  • Author and license
• Installation
  • Packages
  • Docker
  • Proxmox
  • OpenNebula
  • OpenStack
  • Kubernetes CSI
  • S3
  • Building from Source
• Configuration
  • Overview
  • Parameter Reference
    • Common
    • Network
    • Client
    • Global Disk Layout
    • OSD Disk Layout
    • OSD Runtime Parameters
    • Monitor
  • Pool configuration
  • Image metadata in etcd
• Usage
  • vitastor-cli (command-line interface)
  • vitastor-disk (disk management tool)
  • fio for benchmarks
  • UBLK for kernel mounts
  • NBD - old interface for kernel mounts
  • QEMU, qemu-img and VDUSE
  • NFS clustered file system and pseudo-FS proxy
  • Administration
• Performance
  • Understanding storage performance
  • Theoretical performance
  • Example comparison with Ceph
  • Newer benchmark of Vitastor 1.3.1

Author and License

Copyright (c) Vitaliy Filippov (vitalif [at] yourcmc.ru), 2019+

Join Vitastor Telegram Chat: https://t.me/vitastor

All server-side code (OSD, Monitor and so on) is licensed under the terms of Vitastor Network Public License 1.1 (VNPL 1.1), a copyleft license based on GNU GPLv3.0 with the additional "Network Interaction" clause which requires opensourcing all programs directly or indirectly interacting with Vitastor through a computer network and expressly designed to be used in conjunction with it ("Proxy Programs"). Proxy Programs may be made public not only under the terms of the same license, but also under the terms of any GPL-Compatible Free Software License, as listed by the Free Software Foundation. This is a stricter copyleft license than the Affero GPL.

Please note that VNPL doesn't require you to open the code of proprietary software running inside a VM if it's not specially designed to be used with Vitastor.

Basically, you can't use the software in a proprietary environment to provide its functionality to users without opensourcing all intermediary components standing between the user and Vitastor or purchasing a commercial license from the author 😀.

Client libraries (cluster_client and so on) are dual-licensed under the same VNPL 1.1 and also GNU GPL 2.0 or later to allow for compatibility with GPLed software like QEMU and fio.

You can find the full text of VNPL-1.1 in the file VNPL-1.1.txt. GPL 2.0 is also included in this repository as GPL-2.0.txt.