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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Server Redundancy
NSS-HA contains a pair of PowerEdge R710 servers. The two servers are configured in
active/passive mode using the Red Hat Cluster Suite which will be described in later sections.
In such a mode, when a server fails the other automatically takes over the service running on
the failed server. Thus a single server failure does not cause loss of service, although a brief
interruption (refer to Section 4.4) may occur while the failover is taking place.
Figure 2 - NSS-HA Configuration
Each PowerEdge R710 server has a Dell PERC H700 internal RAID controller and five local hard
disks. Two disks are configured in RAID 1 with one disk designated as a hot spare for the
operating system image. The two additional disks are configured in RAID 0 and used for swap
space. Each server has a dual port Dell 6Gbps SAS HBA to connect to the external PowerVault
MD3200 storage enclosure. Each server contains either an InfiniBand card or 10 Gigabit
Ethernet card to connect to the compute nodes. The servers have an iDRAC enterprise
management card for out-of-band systems management.
Power redundancy
Each server has dual power supplies. Each power supply in the server is connected to a
different power bus via a power PDU, which avoids a single point of power supply failure. The
configuration also includes two power PDUs for the two power supplies.