Exporting NIM resources globally

NIM resources can be exported globally using SMIT, or the command line interface.

When resources are allocated for use during NIM operations, they are NFS-exported to the client machines where the operations will be performed. If operations are performed simultaneously on many different clients, the /etc/exports and /etc/xtab files may become very large on the resource servers. This may cause size limits to be exceeded in the files, and it may also negatively affect NIM performance as the files are locked and modified for each resource allocation or deallocation.

In environments where administrators are not concerned about who has access to the NIM resources, they may set an option to globally export the resources and thereby eliminate the repeated updates to the /etc/exports and /etc/xtab files. The only resources that may not be globally exported are those that are used exclusively by diskless and dataless clients. The global export of a NIM resource will make it readable by any machine in the network, not just those in the NIM environment. The resource will be globally exported as long as it is allocated to any client. When the resource is deallocated from all clients, it is unexported.