SwarmFS Deployment

Swarm Software Requirements

Following are the Swarm packages that work with and comprise SwarmFS. Download the latest bundle from the Downloads section on the DataCore Support Portal.

Best practice for upgrades

Upgrade all Swarm components to the versions included in the Swarm bundle unless older versions of Elasticsearch and Content Gateway need to remain.

This is how packages are named for the components in the table below:

Storage: caringo-storage-*.rpm
Storage UI: caringo-storage-webui-*.rpm
Elasticsearch: elasticsearch-*.rpm, elasticsearch-curator-*.rpm
Search: caringo-elasticsearch-search-*.rpm
Gateway: caringo-gateway-*.rpm
Content UI: caringo-gateway-webui-*.rpm
Swarm FS: caringo-nfs-*.rpm, caringo-nfs-libs-*.rpm

Component	Configuration Requirements
Storage	Enable Erasure Coding (EC) — see Configuring Cluster Policies Enable Overlay Index: `index.overlayEnabled= true` — see Configuring the Overlay Index Enable Replicate on Write (ROW) — see Configuring ROW Replicate On Write Set `ec.segmentConsolidationFrequency=100` (Caution: Do not allow the cluster to run near capacity.) Set `health.parallelWriteTimeout` (v10.0+) to a non-zero value, such as 1209600 (2 weeks).
Storage UI	Set the Swarm Search feed to have a 1 second Batch Timeout
Elasticsearch	In the Elasticsearch configuration (`config/elasticsearch.yml)`, make changes needed for SwarmFS: Remove: `filter: lowercase` (case-insensitive metadata searching in Swarm is incompatible with SwarmFS) Remove: `script.indexed`: `true` (use with ES 2.3.3) Add: `script.inline: true` (use with ES 2.3.3 and 5.6.12)
Search	Upgrade to the latest Search RPM when upgrading Storage.
Gateway	SwarmFS can be deployed onto the same Linux server as the Content Gateway.
Content UI	Recommended for viewing and managing objects in the Swarm cluster.
NFS	Do not install SwarmFS server on the same host as Elasticsearch.

Implementing SwarmFS

Important

Complete SwarmFS Planning before proceeding

For SwarmFS, do the following:

Install one or more SwarmFS servers for NFS 4 on designated hardware. See SwarmFS Server Installation.
Create the exports needed for the implementation. See SwarmFS Export Configuration.

Tip

The same bucket can be exported more than once, each with values (such as Read buffer size) optimized for a type of usage. Then point clients and applications to the share best matching the workload.

For functional verification and troubleshooting, create a test domain and bucket and then create an export for that bucket.
Conduct basic testing of read, write, and delete using the NFS client mounts for each of the SwarmFS exports.
Implement HTTPS in front of the service proxy port to help protect the credentials used to access the Ganesha config file and the file itself: see Replicating Feeds over Untrusted Networks.

Mounting the Exports

Follow these guidelines when mounting the SwarmFS exports:

Important

Do not mount any SwarmFS exports on the Ganesha server in production environments.

SwarmFS allows mounting a share immediately, but there is a grace period (1+ minute) before the content displays. Add ExportAfterGrace = TRUE; to the ganesha.conf file to prevent content from appearing to be missing on newly mounted shares. (v2.3)

Linux

Mount the exports as normal, with these explicit options:

Timeout — Increase the timeout, timeo, to 9000.
Version — To verify mounting using the correct protocol, add the "-t nfs" and "vers=<nfsvers>" options.
Best practice: Mount using NFS v4.1. Fall back to 4.0 if the client does not support 4.1.

NFS v4.1

mount -t nfs -o timeo=9000,vers=4.1 SwarmNFSserver:/ /mnt/SwarmNFS

NFS v4.0

mount -t nfs -o timeo=9000,vers=4 SwarmNFSserver:/ /mnt/SwarmNFS

Adjust the mount command as needed for the OS version. Specify version this way on Ubuntu 10.04:

mount -t nfs4 -o timeo=9000 SwarmNFSserver:/ /mnt/SwarmNFS

macOS

Not supported.

Windows

Not supported; Windows has no NFS 4.x client.