# sheepdog/sheepdog

Distributed Storage System for QEMU

Repository: https://github.com/sheepdog/sheepdog
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/sheepdog
Homepage: http://sheepdog.github.io/sheepdog/
Language: C
License: GPL-2.0
License Family: copyleft
Topics: qemu, qemu-kvm, iscsi, iscsi-target, blockdevice, storage, distributed-storage, c, virtualization, vmm, software-defined-storage
Last push: 2020-12-10T18:52:38+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 32/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 5567, "days_push": 2092, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1022, forks 264 (observed 2026-08-28T04:03:15.988442+00:00)

## What it is
Sheepdog is a distributed storage system written in C that provides highly available block-level storage volumes for QEMU/KVM virtual machines, with support for snapshots, cloning, and thin provisioning. It also offers an S3/Swift-compatible object storage interface and scales across clusters managed by Corosync, ZooKeeper, or a local driver.

## Use cases
- provide highly available block storage for QEMU/KVM virtual machines
- set up software-defined distributed storage on a cluster of Linux machines
- store VM disk images with snapshots, cloning, and thin provisioning
- expose S3 or OpenStack Swift compatible object storage
- attach distributed block volumes to a Linux SCSI target (iSCSI)
- build a self-hosted storage backend for OpenStack clouds

## When to choose
- you run QEMU/KVM virtualization on Linux and need replicated, highly available block volumes
- you want a simple, self-hosted distributed storage system with snapshot and thin-provisioning support
- you need an S3/Swift-compatible object store you fully control
- you want storage that scales out across many commodity nodes

## When to avoid
- you need actively maintained software with recent releases and security fixes
- your deployment is not Linux x86-64 or lacks Corosync support
- you need production-grade support and a large community - consider Ceph instead
- you only need single-node storage without clustering

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: maintenance
- function: object-storage, backup
- domain: microservices, cloud-computing, self-hosted, infrastructure-as-code
- platform: c, self-hosted
- tags: distributed-storage, block-storage, qemu, kvm, iscsi, software-defined-storage, thin-provisioning, snapshot, cloning, corosync, storage, virtualization, linux

## Member repositories
- sheepdog/sheepdog (main) score 32

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:15.988442+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T07:08:46.080689+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/sheepdog/sheepdog (fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:15.988442+00:00, sha 712ff786f45e)
  - homepage: http://sheepdog.github.io/sheepdog/ (fetched 2026-08-29T13:08:56.565296+00:00, sha 3db64fb64347)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.