3.5.1 Matrix Server Administration Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction 4

• Group migration of NFS clients. The administrator can gracefully

migrate an NFS service and the associated NFS clients from one server

to another for maintenance or load-balancing purposes, without

downtime or failure of any NFS client.

• Cluster-wide consistent user authentication. A user and NFS client

may always be authenticated, by any NFS server in the cluster, as the

same user and NFS client (assuming that an organizational

authentication service such as LDAP has been deployed).

• Cluster-wide, connection-oriented load balancing. Through the use

of DNS round-robin connection load balancing (or any external load

balancer), NFS client connections mounting through a single common

IP address (or DNS name) will be automatically and evenly

distributed among the NFS servers in the cluster that are exporting the

same filesystems. The DNS service may also be configured for high

availability on the same file-serving cluster.

The Matrix Volume Manager provides the following features:

• Creation of dynamic volumes. Dynamic volumes can be configured

to use either concatenation or striping. A single PSFS filesystem can be

placed on a dynamic volume.

• Manipulation of dynamic volumes. A dynamic volume, and the

filesystem located on that volume, can be extended to include

additional disk partitions. Dynamic volumes can also be recreated or

destroyed.