4.6 Filr Appliance Planning

4.6.1 Filr Appliance-Specific Storage (/vastorage) Sizing

/vastorage can be 5-10 GB in size, because only Ganglia and the appliance-specific files needed for updates are stored there.

4.6.2 Filr Appliance Remote NFS Share (/vashare)

Exporting a remote NFS directory is essential to Filr clustering. Each Filr appliance in the cluster is then configured to point to the remote directory as its /vashare mount point.

Sizing /vashare

/vashare is used by all of the Filr appliances in a Filr Cluster for personal storage, HTML renderings, text extractions made for indexing work, and uploads to Net Folders.

Personal Storage

The files that users store in their assigned My Files personal storage are stored in /vashare. Of course, Home directories are merely a special Net Folder. Their data is stored on the file servers that host them and don’t affect the amount of storage space needed for /vashare.

HTML Renderings

HTML renderings and text extractions have a significant impact on the amount of storage required per file for the Filr appliance.

  • Each HTML rendering occupies disk space.

  • All HTML renderings are stored in /vashare.

  • Only one HTML rendering exists per document.

The disk space used by HTML renderings depends on the type of file that is rendered:

  • Microsoft Office and OpenOffice files use the same amount of disk space as the original file, so a rendered 1 MB file requires an additional 1 MB of disk space.

  • PowerPoint files require ~3 times the disk space as the original file, so a rendered 1 MB file requires an additional 3 MB of disk space.

  • PDF files require 10 times the disk space as the original file, so a rendered 1 MB file requires an additional 10 MB of disk space.

If HTML renderings are consuming more than 10 GB of disk space on your system, you can delete all HTML renderings by restarting the Filr appliance. To restart the Filr appliance, change any configuration option, then click Reconfigure Filr Server, as described in Changing Configuration Options for the Filr Appliance in the Novell Filr 1.0.1 Installation and Configuration Guide.

Indexing Text Extractions

When a file is added to Filr (either to Personal Storage or to a Net Folder), text from the file is extracted and added to the search index to be used for searching. By default, each text-extracted file is truncated to 1.1 MB.

Uploads to Net Folders

For example, if there are 1,000 users uploading a 2MB file at the same time, that activity alone would consume up to 2 GB of disk space.

Conclusion

Depending on the number of files and the number of users, /vashare should probably be at least 50 GB in size and in many cases much larger, depending on usage.

Deployment Caveats

  • Windows NFS services are not supported.

  • The NFS server should be on or near the same subnet as the Filr deployment. Filr is not latency tolerant.

  • When exporting the remote directory, you must specify the rw and no_root_squash export options.

  • If you need to secure NFS server access, then as you specify the export options for the exported directory, ensure that you create a Host Wild Card entry for each Filr appliance that needs access, as shown.

Figure 4-5 Secure NFS Access Requires Specifying Each Client

Otherwise, any NFS client on the network will be able to mount the exported directory.

4.6.3 Filr Clustering Caveats

Filr clustering does not employ traditional cluster services, such as Novell Cluster Services (NCS). Filr clustering involves the following things:

  • MySQL must be configured to recognize each Filr appliance in the cluster and to allow each to access the Filr database.

  • All Filr appliances in the cluster must be configured to share the same storage (/vashare) for all configuration settings and data that is not appliance-specific.

  • Each Filr appliance must be configured with information about all Filr appliances in the cluster.

    Membership information is propagated between appliances as it is changed on one member of the cluster.

  • All Filr appliances must be enabled to work with two Filr Search appliances.