Volume mounted on multiple servers

[Mike Blatsos]

I currently have 300 GB mount point that is running on a RX 6600 server attached to MSA30 that is NFS mounted on 2 other RX 3600 that reads the PDF's to present them to the web. The performance is poor and we are expecting it to grow into the terabyte range. My thought is to move the data to a new mount point on an iSCSI attached EMC array and mount it read only on the 2 web servers, any thoughts or suggestions.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

OS matters here.

NFS 4, which is only available with 11.31 HP-UX can resolve this problem. Also NFS patches can as well.

I would patch the NFS subsystem first. HP calls this patch set ONC.

Can you help out with more information so my answer can be more meaningful? OS. Type of web server, stuff like that.

SEP

[Mike Blatsos]

We are currently on 11.23 and comming up on our quartly patch cycle in 2 weeks. I have never had much luck with large NFS mounts even though we are running APA with 2 active and 2 passive Gig ports on each server. I have done all the recomended NFS tuning and going to 11.31 is at least a year off.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

>> The performance is poor

Can you quantify that? What does "poor" look like? Is it the MSA performance that is poor, or NFS performance?

>> I have done all the recomended NFS tuning

So you've read these White Papers and followed the guidelines in them?:

http://docs.hp.com/en/10388/DesigningaHighPerformanceNFSServer.pdf
http://docs.hp.com/en/14765/v2963139.pdf

>> My thought is to move the data to a new mount point on an iSCSI attached EMC array and mount it read only on the 2 web servers, any thoughts or suggestions.

Yes:

1. If the iSCSI LUN is going to be presented over the same network as the NFS mounts, and the network is already the bottleneck (I'm not saying it is but...) you may get nowhere anyway
2. HP-UX only supports software ISCSI initiators, so iSCSI performance is never going to be too hot
3. If your plan is to present the same LUN to the rx6600 and to the 2 rx3600 hosts and then create volume manager volume and filesystem on that LUN and mount it read-write on the rx6600 and just read-only on the rx3600s then although it can be made to work, it isn't supported without a cluster filesystem (and I'm pretty sure the cluster filesystem available for HP-UX doesn't support SCSI)

HTH

Duncan

[Duncan Edmonstone]

that last sentence should read:

(and I'm pretty sure the cluster filesystem available for HP-UX doesn't support iSCSI)