Clustered NAS for Everyone - Clustering Samba with CTDB

Clustered storage is a very popular topic. Together with the Open Source software CTDB, Samba 3.3 allows for setting up a freely scaling clustered CIFS Server that shares a distributed file system - a feature that current Microsoft servers do not offer!

One of the major challenges Samba has to solve when serving files from multiple nodes of a cluster file sytem is keeping its internal locking TDB databases coherent while still scaling in performance as the number of nodes increases. Naïve approaches have shown this to be a serious problem, which has finally been solved with the invention of CTDB, the clustered implementation of TDB.

This presentation explains the problems Samba faces in a clustered environment and describes the design principles of CTDB. Then it is shown how to configure Samba and CTDB in a file system cluster. Features of CTDB such as recovery and IP failover are covered as well as newer features of clustered Samba like cluster-wide configuration via the new registry based configuration system.