Ben, If you're using Gluster 3.1.1 then you don't need to do anything with vol files including mounting using them. When you mount using -t glusterfs as an option, you can just point to the hostname:/VOLFILE and Gluster will automatically retrieve vol file information and open parallel connections to the Gluster storage nodes. This also means you don't need to mount different hostnames to different clients since the hostname you use is only used for the initial configuration retrieval. Also, when using -t glusterfs to mount, your connection will already be highly available since the Gluster native protocol has failover built in to it. If you are testing failover, just be aware that there is a ping-timeout setting described in the documentation that handles how long Gluster will wait for a server if it is unable to contact a server. -Jacob -----Original Message----- From: gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org [mailto:gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org] On Behalf Of Ben Blakley Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2010 10:49 PM To: gluster-users at gluster.org Subject: Re: simple 2 server replication question - how to mount for HA We are setting up a redundant storage cluster with 2 servers with Gluster FS 3.1 Per the documentation here: http://www.gluster.com/community/documentation/index.php/Gluster_3.1:_Conf iguring_Distributed_Replicated_Volumes We would create a volume using this: #gluster volume create test-volume replica 2 transport tcp server1:/exp1 server2:/exp2 Now my question is how do we mount the clients in a HA fashion so that if one of the servers goes down things stay online? If we use this mount option: #mount -t glusterfs [-o <options>] <volumeserver>:<volumeid> <mount? point> with a single server then there is an issue if that server goes down, I understand we could point to a volume file instead, could that volume file contain references for both servers? #mount -t glusterfs [-o <options>] <path/to/volumefile> <mountpoint> Should/is the replication done on the server side or the client side? It seems it is being replicated by the server with this ?replica 2? volume, so the question is how do we do the mount? Is it possible that the volume information is synched between the 2 servers so that we can point the clients in our environment to either Gluster servers? Many thanks,
