[Samba] samba frond-end (load balancing)

[Marcin Przyczyna]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2005 at 10:14:47PM +0100, vmoravek at atlas.cz wrote:
>    Hi All,
> 
>    I work on HA samba project for my company. My plan is use some samba
>    server like front-ends with remotely storage mouted by nfs to this
>    servers.
> 
>    Questions:
> 
>    1) I read some information about this in official Samba HOW-TO, but i
>    still don't know if this solution is posible or not?

This is not a question of possibility but a question of sense.
Does this idea have sense ?
In my eyes - she doesn't.
Fileserver services are mostly I/O expensive, not CPU. 
That's why your problem is storage and network throughput; 
not the smb servers nor their count, nor their speed.

>    2) and which software or hardware must be use for balancing?

Divide the storage accross multiple disks and RAIDs, 
use DFS for application layer share management,
use faster network and maybe FC instead of NFS.

>    3) May I use dns for load balancig ( I think not, but I'm not sure)

DNS gives you yet more overhead, but (I guess) 
your bottleneck is I/O.

>    4) Excuse me for my bad english and thanks for your time.

Your welcome. My english is bad, too. So what ?
Most important is: I understood you.

>    Look on picture (hope this will ok after send :) )
> 
>                ----------------
>                | LoadBalancing |
>                -----------------
>                       |
>       -----------------------------------
>       |             |         |         |
>    --------     --------  --------  --------
>    |  smb |     |  smb |  |  smb |  |  smb |
>    --------     --------  --------  --------
>       |             |         |         |
>       -----------------------------------
>                        |
> 
>                 ----------------
>                 | storage       |
>                 -----------------

Have a look at this scheme one more time: the "smb" nodes do not 
compute anything. They read and write to/from storage and
send/receive the packets over network. They are - in fact -
I/O <-> network converter.
If you want accelerate your services, balance the load on
storage level: use multiple storages, use different sets of RAIDs.

The addition of succesives smb servers will not increase the global
availability of your fileserver. This goal you can achieve using
i.a. heartbeat as ha-cluster.

Greetigs,
mpr.

-- 
Marcin Przyczyna
Net & Sys Admin,
citiworks AG
mpr at citiworks.de
+49 89 9925 75356