Chapter 1. NFS over GFS in a Red Hat Cluster

This document provides a procedure to configure an NFS service in a Red Hat cluster using the Conga configuration tool. The configured cluster will have the following characteristics:

There are 5 nodes in the cluster.
The NFS service runs over a GFS file system.
There are five NFS clients.

Note that this configuration is not a "high capacity" configuration in the sense that more than one server is providing NFS service. In this configuration, the floating IP moves about as needed, but only one server is active at a time.

Figure 1.1, “NFS over GFS in a 5-Node Cluster” shows the NFS over GFS configuration that this procedure yields.

NFS over GFS in a 5-Node Cluster

Figure 1.1. NFS over GFS in a 5-Node Cluster

In this configuration, Cluster Suite assigns which server will run the NFS service. If that server goes down, the NFS service will automatically fail over to another server in the cluster. The client will not be aware of any loss of service.

The NFS resource that this configuration defines will be NFS Version 3 by default. If you need to restrict what NFS protocol your system provides to its clients, you can do this at NFS startup; this is not part of cluster configuration.

This remainder of this document is organized as follows:

Chapter 2, Prerequisite Configuration describes the prequisite configuration components that have been set up before the procedure documented in this manual beings.
Chapter 3, Components to Configure summarizes the cluster resources that this procedure configures.
Chapter 4, Configuring the Cluster Resources provides the procedures for configuring the cluster resources needed for an NFS service.
Chapter 5, Configuring an NFS Cluster Service provides the procedure for configuring an NFS service in a Red Hat Cluster Suite.
Chapter 6, Testing the NFS Cluster Service provides a procedure to check that the NFS service is working and that it will continue to work as expected if one of the nodes goes down.
Chapter 7, Troubleshooting provides some guidelines to follow when your configuration does not behave as expected.
Chapter 8, The Cluster Configuration File shows the cluster configuration file as it appears before configuring the NFS service and after configuration the NFS service in a Red Hat Cluster Suite.
Chapter 9, Configuration Considerations summarizes some general concerns to consider when configuring an NFS service over a GFS file system in a Red Hat Cluster Suite.