This page provides an overview of AIStor Server deployment architectures from a production perspective. A production AIStor Server deployment consists of at least 4 hosts with homogeneous storage and compute resources. Each AIStor Server host in this pool has matching compute, storage, and network configurations These hosts make up a server pool, where the AIStor Server presents the aggregated compute, memory, and storage as a single resource to clients. Each pool consists of one or more erasure sets.

This page describes how to upgrade MinIO AIStor Helm clusters that use a private container registry but have internet access to helm.min.io for chart updates. If your cluster uses public registries or is in an airgapped environment, see: Upgrade with Public Registries Upgrade in Airgapped Environment Overview MinIO AIStor Helm upgrades involve updating two components:

AIStor Server implements Erasure Coding as a core component in providing data redundancy and availability. The diagrams and content in this section present a simplified view of erasure coding operations and are not intended to represent the complexities of the AIStor Server’s full erasure coding implementation. MinIO AIStor groups drives in each server pool into one or more Erasure Sets of the same size. By default, each erasure set can contain 2 to 16 drives. You can configure erasure sets up to 32 drives with the MINIO_ERASURE_SET_DRIVE_COUNT environment variable if running AIStor Server RELEASE.2026-02-02T23-40-11Z or later.

Troubleshoot common upgrade issues including KES certificates, PolicyBinding errors, OperatorHub subpath problems, and object store failures.

This page provides guidance for upgrading MinIO AIStor Helm clusters on Kubernetes infrastructure. Overview MinIO AIStor Helm installations consist of two primary components: Operator Chart - Controls resources like CustomResourceDefinitions and core operator functionality Object Store Chart - Deploys and manages MinIO AIStor instances Upgrades involve updating these charts and deploying new container images. The exact procedure depends on your cluster environment’s network configuration and registry access.

MinIO AIStor supports publishing audit logs to one or more configured Apache Kafka receivers. MinIO AIStor send an event for each API operation to the receiver for processing and storage. The receiver is responsible for correctly processing events, including returning 200OK or similar success messages upon receipt of the event. MinIO AIStor cannot recover events that were successfully sent but not correctly stored on the receiver. You can configure a new Kafka audit endpoint using either environment variables or runtime configuration settings. If you configure both, MinIO AIStor uses the environment variables.

MinIO AIStor allows you to temporarily remove nodes from active service for planned maintenance operations. Removing nodes allows administrators to gracefully take nodes offline without disrupting cluster operations, similar to the cordon functionality in Kubernetes. A cordoned node finishes in-flight operations and marks itself as unavailable for any other operation. Use this to do hardware maintenance on a node, complete operating system updates, or perform troubleshooting. MinIO AIStor cordoning on Kubernetes In Kubernetes environments, the MinIO AIStor cordoning function applies to the Pod running the associated workload. It does not affect any other Pods or services running on the Kubernetes worker, and acts to ensure the scheduler does not reschedule that Pod during ongoing maintenance operations. The following diagram illustrates the node state transitions during the maintenance workflow:

MinIO AIStor supports hot-swapping failed drives with new healthy drives. Healing MinIO AIStor detects and heals those drives without requiring any node or deployment-level restart. MinIO AIStor healing occurs only on the replaced drive(s) and in most cases has minimal or negligible impact on deployment performance.

The following procedure adds a server pool to an existing MinIO AIStor cluster running on Kubernetes infrastructure. Each pool expands the total available storage capacity of the cluster with new nodes and persistent volumes while maintaining the overall availability of the cluster. Pay particular attention to the parity (EC:M) value of the existing cluster and the new pool. MinIO strongly recommends seeking an architecture review from MinIO Engineering through SUBNET to analyze potential performance impacts before committing to a new pool for your cluster.

AIStor Server publishes cluster and node metrics using the Prometheus Data Model. You can use any scraping tool to pull metrics data from AIStor Server for further analysis and alerting. This page covers metrics version 3, which has additional metrics and endpoints. Existing deployments can continue to use version 2 metrics. Version 3 endpoints The base endpoint, without an added path, returns cluster, node, and per-bucket statistic metrics from /cluster/usage/buckets.