[Linux-cluster] GFS -> NFS, Locking and quotas

[Nathan Ollerenshaw]

All,

I'm currently investigating the feasibility of building a couple of 
Linux based NFS servers that use GFS on a back end EMC CX700 array. I 
had a few requirements for the system.

1. It should support quotas.

It seems that GFS supports quotas just fine, using some commands on the 
machines mounting the GFS filesystems. While this is fine, ideally I'd 
like to be able to query and set the quota information using 
rpc.rquotad and the associated commands 'edquota' and 'quota'.

Is this possible?

2. It should handle locking from the NFS clients.

I wouldn't expect any problems here, but maybe someone here who has 
built something like this has some personal experience they could 
share. :)

3. It would be nice if we could load balance the NFS with sticky load 
balancing of some kind (probably a hardware loadbalancer like a Foundry 
ServerIron XL).

Not sure if this is possible at all, its a nice to have really. But it 
doesn't look impossible, what with NFSv3 and v4 ... ? Any gotchas that 
anyone can think of? NFS is supposed to be stateless, right, so if a 
machine starts talking to a different NFS server, it shouldn't make a 
difference ...

Anyone tried anything like this, or has some advice? Would love some 
feedback.

I will be building out some kind of test system in the following weeks 
with any luck so hopefully I'll be able to answer my own questions, but 
I kinda wanted to know if I've been smoking too much ...

Thanks,

Nathan.

-- 
Nathan Ollerenshaw / Systems Engineer
Systems Engineering
ValueCommerce Co., Ltd.

Tokyo Bldg 4F 3-32-7 Hongo Bunkyo-ku Tokyo 113-0033 Japan
Tel. +81.3.3817.8995   Fax. +81.3.3812.4051
mailto:nathan at valuecommerce.co.jp