Dell FluidFS NAS Solutions Administrator's Guide

For Single Volume Failover, it is important that the environment is set up to properly migrate users of the NAS volumes you are failing over, without disrupting the users of other NAS volumes you are not failing over.

When a NAS Volume is failed over from one NAS Cluster to another, the IP addresses that are used to access it, change from cluster A’s IP addresses to cluster B’s IP address. It is recommended to facilitate this change using DNS. When Single Volume Failover is required, it is recommended to set up a DNS entry to correlate to each NAS Volume, and change the DNS entry for single volumes when they are failed over.

For example, Marketing and Sales have their own NAS Volumes, with a CIFS share on the NAS volume named marketing_share and sales_share. A DNS entry named FluidFSmarketing, is created for Marketing and another DNS entry for Sales called FluidFSsales is created. Both the volumes point to the same set of Client Access VIPs on source Cluster A. Marketing can access the Marketing volume or share using \\FluidFSmarketing\marketing, and Sales can access the Sales volume or share using \\FluidFSsales\sales.

Initially, both DNS entries FluidFSmarketing and FluidFSsales point to the same set of Client Access VIP. At this point, both the marketing and sales shares can be accessed from either one of the DNS names, FluidFSmarketing or FluidFSsales. When you want to fail over a single volume (for example Marketing), change the DNS entries for FluidFSmarketing to resolve to the Client Access VIPs on Cluster B.