Network Home Directories on RAID

[erbdave]

We are setting up a x-serve RAID to host home directories. It’s been fairly easy to do. I’ve created a share-point and automounted it and have some users home-folders in it and they are able to login and get their home directories.

My only concern is that by setting up the share through WGM, the folder is shared over AFP and SMB and I’m worried about the load that will place on a single server through the fibre-channel connection. We are a school with around 3000 users.

Is there a better way to do this?

I don’t think we can afford to set up a SAN right now, should we not try to cluster the home folders until we can afford a SAN?

[erbdave]

Concurrent users would average about between 200 and 400, with peaks of about 800. We have 5 x-serves (3 G5’s, 2 G4s). I could probably dedicate one of the G5s to being an OD Replica and serving out home folders. Will it be able to handle this load, and how can I test it over the Summer?

[erbdave]

I am familiar with the tuning article and will review that again this summer, it sounds like I should not put all of my users onto the RAID, but keep them seperated out on different servers to keep from creating on AFP log-jam.
We’ve had some problems where the server(s) has become “unresponsive” and it is almost always an AFP process that is hogging the processor. Our intention was to remove the users dependency on a single server, so that if one server becomes unresponsive, they would be passed off to a Replica and would still be able to retrieve their home-folder. But since the retrieval of the home folder is AFP dependent, we still have the issue of only one server being capable of accessing the RAID, so we would still have a single point of failure.
Is there any way to make the RAID available to multiple servers?
Are we talking a fibre-channel switch?
Right now it is just accessible as a mounted drive on the server the Fibre is connected too. If I could connect multiple servers I could share drives out on their “primary” server to split the load and balance the AFP. Or is there a better way?

[zooids]

I’m very interested in this as well. We have about 1600 students with network homes and about 200 simultaneous connections. I currently use 4 servers (one for each grade level) but that seems like overkill. I would like to put everything on a single RAID and have 2 servers, one as the primary for AFP, one as a fail-over in case the primary goes down. Thoughts?

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