White Papers
Table Of Contents
- Executive Summary (updated May 2011)
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Dell NFS Storage Solution Technical Overview
- 3. NFS Storage Solution with High Availability
- 4. Evaluation
- 5. Performance Benchmark Results (updated May 2011)
- 6. Comparison of the NSS Solution Offerings
- 7. Conclusion
- 8. References
- Appendix A: NSS-HA Recipe (updated May 2011)
- A.1. Pre-install preparation
- A.2. Server side hardware set-up
- A.3. Initial software configuration on each PowerEdge R710
- A.4. Performance tuning on the server
- A.5. Storage hardware set-up
- A.6. Storage Configuration
- A.7. NSS HA Cluster setup
- A.8. Quick test of HA set-up
- A.9. Useful commands and references
- A.10. Performance tuning on clients (updated May 2011)
- A.11. Example scripts and configuration files
- Appendix B: Medium to Large Configuration Upgrade
- Appendix C: Benchmarks and Test Tools
Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution - High Availability Configurations
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HARDWARE
COMPONENT
NSS without HA NSS with HA
network
Storage controller for
local disks
PERC H700, 5 local disks
Public network to
clients
InfiniBand or 10 Gigabit Ethernet
Table 7 - Comparison of Software Configuration
SOFTWARE
COMPONENT
NSS without HA NSS with HA
Operating System Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 x86_64
HA Cluster Software None required Red Hat Cluster Suite for RHEL 5.5
Systems Management Dell OpenManage Server Administrator
Storage Management None required Dell Modular Disk Storage Manager
InfiniBand driver Mellanox OFED 1.5.1
10 GbE driver Native to RHEL 5.5
File system Red Hat XFS
LVM create
parameters
lvcreate -i <number_of_arrays> -I 1024 -l 100%FREE VGName
XFS create
parameters
mkfs.xfs -l size=128m <path_to_LV>
XFS mount options “noatime, allocsize=1g,
nobarrier, inode64,
logbsize=262144”
“noatime, allocsize=1g, nobarrier,
inode64, logbsize=262144, wsync”
NFS export options “async” if performance is the
key criteria
“sync” option must be used for data
corrected. “async” will not guarantee
data correctness.
7. Conclusion
This solution guide enhances Dell’s HPC storage solutions with an NFS offering that includes a High
Availability feature. The Dell NFS Storage Solution is available with deployment services and full
hardware and software support from Dell. This document provides complete information on
architecting, deploying and tuning such a solution. The guidelines include hardware and software
information along with detailed configuration steps and best practices make it easy to deploy and
manage. The performance tuning notes and results describe the capability of the architecture.
8. References
1) Clusters have become the most popular architecture for HPC today.
http://www.top500.org/overtime/list/36/archtype