CentOS - Jul 2009 - Setting up Linux File Servers in a University Environment

Hello Everyone

I work for a University Department that has a high number of Linux 
Desktop Users.  Currently we provide a users home directory via NFS from 
a file server.  Generally it works well for us, but I have been asked to 
look at our options for expanding the storage we have available.

So I thought one of the first things I had better do is consider are 
there alternatives to the way we do things now that could be better for us.

My initial research suggests that the only real alternative to NFS in 
this context is ISCSI or perhaps the combination of ISCSI and GFS.

So I was wondering has anyone on this list in a similar field implement 
ISCSI for home directories instead of NFS?  And if so would you be able 
to give me some idea of the costs/ benefits of doing this?

Thank you for your time and any insights you are willing to share.

Hi,

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 20:33, Clint Dilks<clintd at scms.waikato.ac.nz>
wrote:
> My initial research suggests that the only real alternative to NFS in
> this context is ISCSI or perhaps the combination of ISCSI and GFS.
iSCSI and GFS would be good if you have a small number of powerful and
highly available nodes running a critical application such as a
database server.

For home directories NFS is still the most appropriate protocol to use.

If you want scalability and high availability, you might set up a
couple of servers using a GFS filesystem and have both of them serve
NFS to the clients, but GFS is not a "set up and forget" kind of
technology and if you don't have the knowledge or resources I believe
it will actually cause more downtimes than it can prevent...

For simple scalability, I suggest you set up multiple NFS servers and
spread home directories of different users in different NFS servers.
You may use automount with LDAP in order to define in which server a
specific user's home directory is.

If you want something more robust and with more features (like thin
provisioning, writable snapshots, etc.) you might look into NAS
storage such as NetApp or Celerra or Isilon or BlueArc. Most of those
are available in dual-head setups for high availability. But if you go
with those, expect a different kind of price tag...

HTH,
Filipe

On Jul 23, 2009, at 8:33 PM, Clint Dilks <clintd at scms.waikato.ac.nz>  
wrote:
> Hello Everyone
>
> I work for a University Department that has a high number of Linux
> Desktop Users.  Currently we provide a users home directory via NFS  
> from
> a file server.  Generally it works well for us, but I have been  
> asked to
> look at our options for expanding the storage we have available.
>
> So I thought one of the first things I had better do is consider are
> there alternatives to the way we do things now that could be better  
> for us.
>
> My initial research suggests that the only real alternative to NFS in
> this context is ISCSI or perhaps the combination of ISCSI and GFS.
>
> So I was wondering has anyone on this list in a similar field  
> implement
> ISCSI for home directories instead of NFS?  And if so would you be  
> able
> to give me some idea of the costs/ benefits of doing this?
ISCSI isn't really suited for this. You would use iSCSI to provide  
storage to your NFS servers probably from a large storage box like an  
EMC, 3PAR or such.

You could make your own massive storage server and present the storage  
in parts via iSCSI to different NFS servers serving different parts of  
campus.

-Ross