NFS¶

CephFS namespaces can be exported over NFS protocol using the NFS-Ganesha NFS server.

Requirements¶

Ceph filesystem (preferably latest stable luminous or higher versions)
In the NFS server host machine, ‘libcephfs2’ (preferably latest stable luminous or higher), ‘nfs-ganesha’ and ‘nfs-ganesha-ceph’ packages (latest ganesha v2.5 stable or higher versions)
NFS-Ganesha server host connected to the Ceph public network

Configuring NFS-Ganesha to export CephFS¶

NFS-Ganesha provides a File System Abstraction Layer (FSAL) to plug in different storage backends. FSAL_CEPH is the plugin FSAL for CephFS. For each NFS-Ganesha export, FSAL_CEPH uses a libcephfs client, user-space CephFS client, to mount the CephFS path that NFS-Ganesha exports.

Setting up NFS-Ganesha with CephFS, involves setting up NFS-Ganesha’s configuration file, and also setting up a Ceph configuration file and cephx access credentials for the Ceph clients created by NFS-Ganesha to access CephFS.

NFS-Ganesha configuration¶

A sample ganesha.conf configured with FSAL_CEPH can be found here, https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/blob/next/src/config_samples/ceph.conf. It is suitable for a standalone NFS-Ganesha server, or an active/passive configuration of NFS-Ganesha servers managed by some sort of clustering software (e.g., Pacemaker). Important details about the options are added as comments in the sample conf. There are options to do the following:

minimize Ganesha caching wherever possible since the libcephfs clients (of FSAL_CEPH) also cache aggressively
read from Ganesha config files stored in RADOS objects
store client recovery data in RADOS OMAP key-value interface
mandate NFSv4.1+ access
enable read delegations (need at least v13.0.1 ‘libcephfs2’ package and v2.6.0 stable ‘nfs-ganesha’ and ‘nfs-ganesha-ceph’ packages)

Configuration for libcephfs clients¶

Required ceph.conf for libcephfs clients includes:

a [client] section with mon_host option set to let the clients connect to the Ceph cluster’s monitors, e.g.,
```
[client]
        mon host = 192.168.1.7:6789, 192.168.1.8:6789, 192.168.1.9:6789
```

Mount using NFSv4 clients¶

It is preferred to mount the NFS-Ganesha exports using NFSv4.1+ protocols to get the benefit of sessions.

Conventions for mounting NFS resources are platform-specific. The following conventions work on Linux and some Unix platforms:

From the command line:

mount -t nfs -o nfsvers=4.1,proto=tcp <ganesha-host-name>:<ganesha-pseudo-path> <mount-point>

Current limitations¶

Per running ganesha daemon, FSAL_CEPH can only export one Ceph filesystem although multiple directories in a Ceph filesystem may be exported.