Remote Access Layer

[NicholasRush]

Hello everyone,

For highly available storage systems or virtualization clusters with shared storage, ZFS would require a remote access layer. This layer would, for example, allow a pool that is physically attached to server A to be mounted in server B via RDMA or TCP and used like a local file system. In this case, server A would have to do the file locking without a cluster-wide locking mechanism because it physically describes the pool. Only when the pool would be physically mounted on server B because server A is broken would it provide the locking mechanism.

The failover could also be carried out transparently for the application through ZFS because the pool would no longer have to be remounted. In this way you could then bind the L2Arc and the slog to the host and no longer to the pool, since technically it would then not matter from which server the pool is written or read from. Only the server that has physical access to the disks can write data to the disks, but the slog would then have to be synchronized between the HA hosts.