Feature Request: in hpc-slurm, add ability to make custom NFS shares/mounts

[bo-qeye]

(Forgive me if this is already achievable; I have searched high and low and found no solution.)

We have some legacy software that expects to find files in a certain hardcoded path, both on the controller, login and compute nodes. Currently, only /home/ and /opt/apps/ are exported and auto-mounted. I would like to be able to expand this list.

The client part of this is already in place, by way of modules/file-system/pre-existing-network-storage, but for the server part, there is no nice way.

Options I've explored:

• FileStore. Works fine but is very expensive, as minimum size is 1TB.
• Roll-your-own NFS server instance. Works fine, but needs setting up, and also has unnecessary costs associated.

[cboneti]

You have two additional options:

Object store

If you don't need many posix features, or even better if it will be used read only, you could simply use the pre-existing-network storage to mount a gcs bucket through gcs-fuse. That is the cheapest option you will have (and also extremely scalable). If you want to create the bucket in the blueprint, you can use community/modules/file-system/cloud-storage-bucket.
This has limitations as it doesn't implement full posix support, so if file permissions, locks, etc are important to you, consider the nfs below. But it is worth trying. Many customers use gcs buckets as it has great scalability and price.

NFS

community/modules/file-system/nfs-server is the roll-your-own-nfs-server, but fully automated, the parameters are similar to filestore (notice that rather than local_mount, you have local_mounts: [/mnt1], which allows multiple mount points.
It is community and not a core supported feature but it is generally well tested.

I will close this feature request as I feel it is already available, but please feel free to reopen it if you feel it's not resolved.

[bo-qeye]

Thank you very much, community/modules/file-system/nfs-server solved the problem. Uses an additional instance, but we will have to live with that.

Does anyone know; is it possible to have multiple exports across multiple disks (I'd like a fast /tmp/ export on a pd-ssd and a cheap bulk storage one on a pd-standard, for instance.)

[cboneti]

I don't think nfs-server does this. It has a single storage disk. You might need two of them, make code changes to nfs-server or use a mix between nfs-server and object-store.

[bo-qeye]

I'd rather avoid both, but thanks anyways.