As one of the more Isilon-centric vSpecialists at EMC, I see a lot of questions about leveraging Isilon NFS in vSphere environments. Most of them are around the confusion of how SmartConnect works and the load balancing/distribution it provides. Not too long ago, a question arose around mounting NFS exports from an Isilon cluster, and… Read More »
Looking back that the SmartConnect Part I post, remember that SmartConnect is handling DNS delegation of the SmartConnect Zone name (FQDN)… So… What happens if the SmartConnect Zone for an NFS data network is on an isolated network? Keep in mind, that DNS needs to contact the SmartConnect Service IP to request an IP resolution… Read More »
In Part I, I covered SmartConnect Basic, an included feature of OneFS, that handles connections to Isilon node IP addresses based on a Round Robin connection policy. What do you do if you want a more dynamic, more resilient, and better load balanced solution? You implement SmartConnect Advanced. Remember, that SmartConnect Advanced requires an additional… Read More »
I posted an article on VMware vSphere and EMC Isilon (VMware vSphere and EMC Isilon – One datastore or many?) and covered some of the basics of SmartConnect when used with NFS datastores. I talked about some of the abilities of SmartConnect, but didn’t really cover how to configure it. As mentioned in my previous… Read More »