Disclosed is an approach for overseeing the overall state of a virtual storage system, and for taking actions as necessary to manage the health and efficient performance of that system. A curator entity is provided on a distributed basis to manage and perform these functions. A master curator manages this workload that is performed by multiple slave curators. MapReduce operations are performed to implement the curator workload. Periodically, the master curator coordinates a full scan of all the metadata in the system using three MapReduce operations. Partial scans may also be run using a single MapReduce operation.