Clustered NFS and GPFS on Linux®

In addition to the traditional exporting of GPFS file systems using NFS, GPFS allows you to configure a subset of the nodes in the cluster to provide a highly available solution for exporting GPFS file systems via NFS.

The participating nodes are designated as Cluster NFS (CNFS) member nodes and the entire setup is frequently referred to as CNFS or CNFS cluster.

In this solution, all CNFS nodes export the same file systems to the NFS clients. When one of the CNFS nodes fails, the NFS serving load moves from the failing node to another node in the CNFS cluster. Failover is done using recovery groups to help choose the preferred node for takeover.