How to Deploy a High‑Availability MinIO Distributed Cluster on Rocky 9

Overview

MinIO distributed storage aggregates multiple drives across hosts into a single object storage server, offering high performance, low operational cost, data protection with erasure coding, and read‑after‑write consistency.

Prerequisites

At least 4 nodes with identical root credentials (MINIO_ROOT_USER, MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD).

Each node must have 4‑16 drives forming EC sets; total drives must be a multiple of EC set count.

Consistent OS, network, and time (NTP) across nodes.

Environment preparation

Set hostnames, update /etc/hosts, disable firewalld and SELinux, configure a domestic yum source, install required packages, and apply tuned performance profile.

hostnamectl set-hostname minio1
# repeat for other nodes
cat >> /etc/hosts <<EOF
192.168.50.137 minio1
192.168.50.138 minio2
192.168.50.139 minio3
192.168.50.140 minio4
192.168.50.141 nginx
EOF
systemctl disable --now firewalld
iptables -F
yum install -y bash-completion mlocate wget tar

Increase file limits in /etc/security/limits.conf and apply sysctl settings for network and memory.

Create MinIO user and directories

useradd -rs /bin/false minio
mkdir -p /etc/minio /var/log/minio /minio_data
chown -R minio:minio /etc/minio /var/log/minio /minio_data

Configuration file

MINIO_ROOT_USER=admin
MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=Wps@123456
MINIO_VOLUMES="http://192.168.50.137:9000/minio_data http://192.168.50.138:9000/minio_data http://192.168.50.139:9000/minio_data http://192.168.50.140:9000/minio_data"
MINIO_OPTS="--deduplication --console-address :9001 --address :9000"

Systemd service

[Unit]
Description=MinIO
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target
AssertFileIsExecutable=/usr/local/bin/minio
AssertFileNotEmpty=/etc/minio/minio.conf

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/usr/local
User=minio
Group=minio
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/minio/minio.conf
ExecStartPre=/bin/bash -c "if [ -z \"$MINIO_VOLUMES\" ]; then echo \"MINIO_VOLUMES not set\"; exit 1; fi"
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/minio server $MINIO_VOLUMES $MINIO_OPTS
Restart=always
LimitNOFILE=65536

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Reload daemon, enable and start the service on each node.

Testing

Access any node on port 9000 for the API or port 9001 for the console, using the credentials defined above.

Nginx load balancing

Install nginx and configure upstreams for both console (port 9001) and API (port 9000) with appropriate proxy settings.

upstream minio_console {
    ip_hash;
    server 192.168.50.137:9001;
    server 192.168.50.138:9001;
    server 192.168.50.139:9001;
    server 192.168.50.140:9001;
}
server {
    listen 80;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://minio_console;
        # additional proxy headers as needed
    }
}

Restart nginx and verify access through the load balancer.

Verification

Use curl health‑check endpoints or the MinIO client (mc) to confirm cluster health and data availability.

curl -I http://192.168.50.137:9000/minio/health/live
mc alias set myminio http://192.168.50.137:9000 admin Wps@123456
mc admin info myminio