5.3. Exporting Storage Space via NFS

Acronis Cyber Infrastructure allows you to organize nodes into a highly available NFS cluster in which you can create NFS shares. An NFS share is an access point for a volume and it can be assigned an IP address or a DNS name. The volume, in turn, can be assigned a redundancy scheme, a tier, and a failure domain. In each share, you can create multiple NFS exports that are actual exported directories for user data. Each export has, among other properties, a path that, combined with share’s IP address, uniquely identifies the export on the network and allows you to mount it using standard tools.

On the technical side, NFS volumes are based on object storage. Aside from offering high availability and scalability, object storage eliminates the limit on the amount of files and the size of data you can keep in the NFS cluster. Each share is perfect for keeping billions of files of any size. However, such scalability implies I/O overhead that is wasted on file size changes and rewrites. For this reason, an NFS cluster makes a perfect cold and warm file storage, but is not recommended for hot and high performance, and data that is often rewritten (like running virtual machines). Integration of Acronis Cyber Infrastructure with solutions from VMware, for example, is best done via iSCSI to achieve better performance.

5.3.1. Creating an NFS Cluster

  1. In the left menu, click STORAGE SERVICES > NFS.
  2. Select node(s) and click Create NFS cluster in the right menu. For the evaluation scenario, we recommend selecting three nodes.
  3. Click CREATE.

After the NFS cluster has been created, you can proceed to create NFS shares.

5.3.2. Creating NFS Shares

  1. On the STORAGE SERVICES > NFS > SHARES screen, click ADD NFS SHARE.
  2. On the Add NFS Share panel, specify a name (for example, share1) and a unique resolvable static IP address from the public network.
  3. In Share size, specify the size. For users accessing exports, this value will be the filesystem size.
  4. Select the desired tier, failure domain, and data redundancy type. Click DONE.

After the share has been created, you can proceed to create NFS exports.

5.3.3. Creating and Mounting NFS Exports

  1. On the STORAGE SERVICES > NFS > SHARES screen, click the number in the Exports column in the row of the desired share. This will open the share screen.

  2. On the share screen, click ADD EXPORT, specify root as the export name and / as the path, and select the Read and write access mode. This will create a directory with a default path that designates the export location inside the share and is used (alongside share’s IP address) to mount the export. The root export will be shown in the export list.

  3. After creating the root export, you can mount it on Linux or macOS as described in the Storage User’s Guide. For our evaluation scenario, mount it on Linux with the following commands:

    # mkdir /mnt/nfs
    # mount -t nfs -o vers=4.0 <share_IP>:/<share_name>/ /mnt/nfs
    

    where:

    • -o vers=4.0 is the NFS version to use.
    • <share_IP> is the share IP address. You can also use the share hostname.
    • /<share_name>/ is the root export path, like share1.
    • /mnt/nfs is an existing local directory to mount the export to.

To check the mounted storage, you can run df -h.