NFS Questions/Best Practices

[Greg Stark_1]

Being somewhat new to NFS, I have a few questions about NFS configuration and best practices I was hoping you could help me with.

Config:
Rp2470, 11.0, 2 GB ethernet cards directly attached to a Network Appliance F810 Filer(NAS). Server will not export any FS's and will be used mainly as an Oracle database server.

Questions:
1. Given the config above, are the following options correct in nfsconf?

NFS_CLIENT="1"
NFS_SERVER="0"
NUM_NFSD=4
NUM_NFSIOD=4
PCNFS_SERVER=0
LOCKD_OPTIONS=""
STATD_OPTIONS=""
MOUNTD_OPTIONS=""
AUTOMOUNT=0
AUTO_MASTER="/etc/auto_master"
AUTO_OPTIONS="-f $AUTO_MASTER"
START_MOUNTD=1

I'm especially questioning if I need to start the NFS_SERVER and/or the automout/autofs daemons.

2. NetApp has recommended mounting the NFS FS's with the attached options(out of /etc/fstab). Do these seem ok? Also, when I do a mount -v, I don't see some of the options such as proto=udp. Is this because some of the settings are NFS defaults?

3. Does anybody have any other NFS configuation options/best practices I should explore or be sure to check?

Thanks again,
Greg

[Vincent Fleming]

Greg,

Here's a best-practice for you: Don't put databases on NFS!!!

It's about the WORST performance you can get from a database.

However, I would say that you should listen to NetApps about configuring it to give you the best performance it can. (albeit, it will still suck wind compared to SAN or direct-attached storage).

Good luck!

Vince

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

If you are not exporting any filesystems, you don't need to enable the NFS_SERVER variable therefore the server.

If you commonly transfer large datafiles between machines it can be useful. If you are going to do anything with Ignite, you must enable NFS_SERVER and export filesystems.

If you need to provide access to non Unix machines, CIFS is a better, more robust alternative. Its based on Samba, and we use it to provide access to programmers moving obects to and from a development environment that works on an NTFS filesystem.

Here is a link.
https://payment.ecommerce.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/try.pl?productNumber=CIFSTP22&date=


My one recommendation concerning NFS is that you use the latest version with all the patches. Older versions have significant performance problems.

Hope this helps.

SEP

[Greg Stark_1]

Thanks for the info. As for databases over NFS, we did explore many options with SAN and NAS and eventually chose NAS becuase of ease of administration, cost, and since Oracle uses NetApp filers to house their databases, we figured we would be ok.

[Vincent Fleming]

FYI:

Did Oracle tell you that they use NetApps? Or did NetApps tell you that?

Did you know that Oracle uses HP servers and Storage in their development labs?

[Jakes Louw_1]

Just make sure that you use the "SOFT" mount option, otherwise expect severe problems on the clients if the server dies/reboots, or if there are any network problems.

The SOFT option is SUPPOSED to stop the client from hanging while it retries the connection. I've seen that BDF still has problems, though, if the NFS server becomes unavailable, and I've even had cases where I've needed to reboot the clients to recover the link.
Seems like NFSv3 sucks a little?

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Greg,

Please read the attached:

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid5_gci873335,00.html

Where databases on NAS devices are concerned *always* use hard mounts to prevent data corruption.

If you want to prevent the kind of stops responding that Jakes aludes to:

1. Use port aggregation on your host to remove NIC as single point of failure.

2. Cluster your NetApp Filer

3. Make sure your network co nfig is also highly available.

HTH

Duncan