Isilon Share/Quota replication

[KMac]

I have a couple of Isilon clusters running 6.5.4.10 and replicating
between two data centers: mostly, a primary/standby type
configuration. We are using SyncIQ to replicate the data, and that is
going well.

I am looking for a way to keep share/export/quota information
synchronized between the two clusters, without haven to manually enter
the information on both. What are some ways y’all have approached
replicating CIFS shares, NFS exports, SmartQuotas, etc to the
alternate site? I am considering writing a script to do this, but
thought I’d check with the user community on alternatives before
spending my time doing so.

Thanks!

-Kevin

[SCR512]

Yeah, I am facing the same question. From what I can tell, there isn't an obvious way to sanely export/import SMB and NFS shares between clusters. At present I am doing this by hand. There is a forum post about it in the community forums that states as much: https://community.emc.com/thread/168386

So for now my hand for me, I suppose I could do some custom scripting but honestly this needs to be baked in if they want to market SyncIQ as a serious DR answer IMO. 

[Jerry Uanino]

There is an xml file in /etc/mcp (I think) that stores all the NFS exports.  I am not sure if this changes from version to version.  I believe we used this to reproduce a problematic export list for a repro for something in a test cluster.  I believe in newer versions the export option is gone for xml and now exports in json.  It would be possible to write an importer, but nicer if isilon support a --import on isi nfs expots maybe?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Isilon Technical User Group" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to isilon-user-gr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

[SCR512]

Yeah, I know that in the older versions of OneFS one could just copy over this XML blob. Yeah, at the very least an export/import option would be nice although ideally it was be best just to integrate this all (Share/Export,SmartQuota,SnapshotIQ configs) in SyncIQ. I'm going to guess that _most_ folks are using this as a DR strategy to quickly failover/failback in the event of a cluster going boom. Hopefully this will be addressed in later versions of OneFS.

That said, with long-haul Infiniband it might be possible to just spread a cluster across a campus. If this happens then SyncIQ in our case might just be used for "backups" :)

[Erik Weiman]

This file on the cluster defines the NFS exports:

/ifs/.ifsvar/modules/nfs/nfs_override.xml

I believe this would be as simple as copy this file from cluster to cluster to replicate the NFS exports from one cluster to another.

You will want to make sure that ALL paths exist on the target cluster as invalid export paths will cause alerts to be generated.

You could also bring over the SMB shares and settings using something like this to pull the appropriate info from the configuration file that holds many other cluster settings.

To export the current SMB settings to a file (then copy this file to the desired cluster):

# grep "registry.Services.lwio.Parameters.Drivers.srv.shares.[s.._]" /ifs/.ifsvar/main_config.gc >> /ifs/smblist.out

To import the SMB settings to new cluster (I suggest removing any current shares to prevent any possible naming collisions):

Step 1 make a backup of the file we will modify!

# cp /ifs/.ifsvar/main_config.gc /ifs/.ifsvar/main_config.gc.bak

Step 2 append the new values to the end of the file (the SMB settings are long and each value needs to remain on a single line so copy paste of output to a terminal will break your main_config.gc file):

# cat /ifs/smblist.out >> /ifs/.ifsvar/main_config.gc

You should now see the same SMB shares and SMB share permissions set between each cluster (make sure the authentication sources are the same first before importing!).

For quotas I am not sure where they would be stored on the cluster.

** I have done _minimal_ testing of this and at face value this appears to work properly, please test locally before using as a production method. **

--

[Jason Davis]

Ah nice. Yeah, this seems easier to do in a one shot vs doing this all through CLI.

 

I'll give this a go on our DR side and see how it behaves. As long as I can get more-a-less synced up then I can just build a simple BASH script that will create shares/permissions/SmartQuotas/SnapshotIQ  on both nodes at the same time to stay in sync.

[SCR512]

Cool that worked out perfectly for the NFS bits. I have a relatively small amount of SMB shares so I just set these up by hand in CLI. 

Thanks for the tip!

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to isilon-user-group+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Isilon Technical User Group" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to isilon-user-group+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

[Alexandra Harker]

I know this post is old, but I was wondering if you had done any more testing with this. I tried it on my test clusters, but after the changes it wouldn't let me delete or modify the shares logged in as root. Even the --force via CLI wouldn't allow me. I was just curious if I messed something up or if it was a quirk of applying the shares this way.