[Gluster-users] NFS availability

[harry mangalam]

On Thursday, January 31, 2013 11:28:04 AM glusterzhxue wrote:
> Hi all,
> As is known to us all, gluster provides NFS mount. However, if the mount
> point fails, clients will lose connection to Gluster. While if we use
> gluster native client, this fail will have no effect on clients. For
> example:
 mount -t glusterfs host1:/vol1  /mnt
> 
> If host1 goes down for some reason, client works still, it has no sense
> about the failure(suppose we have multiple gluster servers).  

The client will still fail (in most cases) since host1 (if I follow you) is 
part of the gluster groupset. Certainly if it's a distributed-only, maybe not 
if it's a dist/repl gluster.  But if host1 goes down, the client will not be 
able to find a gluster vol to mount.

> However, if
> we use the following:
 mount -t nfs -o vers=3   host1:/vol1 /mnt

> If host1 failed, client will lose connection to gluster servers.

If the client was mounting the glusterfs via a re-export from an intermediate 
host, you might be able to failover to another intermediate NFS server, but if 
it was a gluster host, it would fail due to the reasons above.

> Now, we want to use NFS way. Could anyone give us some suggestion to solve
> the issue?

Multiple intermediate NFS servers with round-robin addressing?
Anyone tried this?

 
> Thanks
> 
> Zhenghua

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Harry Mangalam - Research Computing, OIT, Rm 225 MSTB, UC Irvine
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