What is MinIO?

MinIO is a high-performance object storage service released under the GNU Affero General Public License V3.0. If you are reading this article, most of you may have heard of or used the Amazon S3 storage service. We can say that the MinIO service has nearly the same functionalities as S3. By using MinIO, you can create your own S3 server at a lower cost.

What is Object Storage?

Object storage takes every part of the data and redesigns it as an object. Unlike file storage and block storage, the data is stored in unique metadata sections assigned piece by piece in the storage pool.

Preparation and Requirements

In this article, we will use the Ubuntu 20.04 operating system.

• 4 Ubuntu 20.04 installed servers

• Root access on all nodes

• Stable internet connection on the nodes where installation will take place

After Meeting the Requirements, We Can Proceed to Installation.

The next steps must be done completely on all nodes.

1. Mount a New Disk Aside from the Disk Where the Operating System is Installed

Our essential requirement for MinIO cluster installation is to mount a new disk for the MinIO service aside from the disk where the operating system is installed.

We can list the disks connected to the machine with the following command.

fdisk -l

 Disk /dev/xvda:   80   GiB,   85899345920   bytes,   167772160   sectors
 Units: sectors of   1   *   512   =   512   bytes
 Sector size (logical/physical):   512   bytes /   512   bytes
 I/O size (minimum/optimal):   512   bytes /   512   bytes
 Disklabel type: gpt
 Disk identifier: 2666C97D-884F-4535-8F56-5DCE785E1D25
 ​
 Device       Start       End   Sectors Size Type
 /dev/xvda1      2048          4095          2048     1M BIOS boot
 /dev/xvda2      4096       2101247       2097152     1G Linux filesystem
 /dev/xvda3   2101248   167772126    165670879    79G Linux filesystem
 ​
 ​
 ​
 ​
 Disk /dev/xvdb:   20   GiB,   21474836480   bytes,   41943040   sectors
 Units: sectors of   1   *   512   =   512   bytes
 Sector size (logical/physical):   512   bytes /   512   bytes
 I/O size (minimum/optimal):   512   bytes /   512   bytes
 ​

You will encounter an output similar to the one above. Here, the /dev/xvda disk is the disk where our operating system is installed. The newly added disk appears as /dev/xvdb.

Before performing the mount operation for the new disk, we need to do a few more things.

First, create a physical area with the following command.

pvcreate /dev/xvdb

Immediately after, we create the directory where we will mount our disk.

mkdir /data

Then we create the file system of our new disk with the following command.

mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdb

After creating the file system, we perform the last remaining step for the mount operation. We configure the disk and mount directory in the /etc/fstab file.

nano /etc/fstab

After reaching the file, we add the following line.

/dev/xvdb /data ext4 defaults,noatime,nofail 0 0

Our disk is now ready for the mount operation. We perform the mount operation with the following command.

mount -a

You can verify the mount operation with the following command.

df -h

Don't forget that we need to perform the same operation on all nodes.

2. Perform MinIO Service Installation

Prepare your operating system before service installation. You can carry out the operations with the following command.

apt update && apt upgrade && apt install wget -y

Then we download the MinIO service and give the required permissions.

wget -O /usr/local/bin/minio https://dl.minio.io/server/minio/release/linux-amd64/minio

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/minio

We create and edit the service file for MinIO in the directory where our system services are located.

nano /lib/systemd/system/minio.service

Copy and paste the following lines and save.

 [Unit]
 ​
   Description  =minio
 ​
   Documentation  =https://docs.min.io
 ​
   Wants  =network-online.target
 ​
   After  =network-online.target
 ​
   AssertFileIsExecutable  =/usr/local/bin/minio
 ​
  [Service]
 ​
   WorkingDirectory  =/usr/local/
 ​
   User  =root
 ​
   Group  =root
 ​
   EnvironmentFile  =/etc/default/minio
 ​
   ExecStart  =/usr/local/bin/minio   server     $MINIO_OPTS   \
         --console-address   ":9001"  
 ​
   Restart  =always
 ​
   LimitNOFILE  =65536
 ​
   TimeoutStopSec  =infinity
 ​
   SendSIGKILL  =  no  
 ​
  [Install]
 ​
   WantedBy  =multi-user.target

Then we create and edit our MinIO config file.

nano /etc/default/minio

Copy and paste the following lines. Don't forget to change the necessary places with your own information.

 MINIO_OPTS=  "http://hostname1:9000/data     http://hostname2:9000/data         http://hostname3:9000/data         http://hostname4:9000/data     "  
 ​
 MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=  "A secure key that will serve as at least a 16 character user information"  
 ​
 MINIO_SECRET_KEY=  "A console login password of at least 16 characters"  

If you have performed the same operations on all nodes mentioned above, the only thing left is to run the MinIO service on each node individually.

systemctl daemon-reload systemctl enable minio systemctl start minio.service

And finally, you can verify that your cluster is running actively with the following command.

systemctl status minio.service

Your MinIO cluster is now ready for use. See you in another article :)