White Papers
10 Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution – High Availability (NSS7.0-HA) Configuration
4 Evaluation
The architecture proposed in this technical white paper was evaluated in the Dell HPC lab. This section
describes the test methodology and the test bed used for verification. Also provides information about the
functionality tests. Performance tests and results are described in Section 5 later in this white paper.
4.1 Method
The NFS Storage Solution described in this solution guide was tested for HA functionality and
performance. A 480 TB NSS7.0-HA configuration was used to test the HA functionality of the solution.
Different types of failures were introduced and the fault-tolerance and robustness of the solution was
verified. Section 4.3 describes these HA functionality tests and their results. HA functionality testing was
similar to the work done in the previous versions of the solution
(1), (2),(3),(4),(5)
.
4.2 Test Bed
The test bed used to evaluate the NSS7.0-HA functionality and performance is shown in Figure 2. The
following configuration was used.
A 32-node HPC compute cluster (also known as “the clients”) was used to provide I/O network
traffic for the test bed.
A pair of Dell PowerEdge R730 servers were configured as an active-passive HA pair and function
as a NFS server for the HPC compute cluster.
Both NFS servers were connected to a shared Dell PowerVault MD3460 storage enclosure
extended with one Dell PowerVault MD3060e storage enclosure (Figure 2 shows a 480 TB
solution with the two PowerVault MD storage arrays) at the back-end. The user data is stored on
an XFS file system created on this storage. The XFS file system was exported to the clients by using
NFS.
The NFS servers were connected to the clients by using the public network. This network was Intel
OPA.
For the HA functionality of the NFS servers, a private 1 Gigabit Ethernet network was configured to
monitor server health and heartbeat, and to provide a route for the fencing operations by using a
Dell Networking 3048-ON Gigabit Ethernet switch.
Power to the NFS servers was provided by two APC switched PDUs on two separate power buses.
Complete configuration details are provided in Table 3, Table 4, and Table 5.