Introduction

Many organizations are using external storage with the virtual appliance alone, to increase capabilities and support high request loads without increase virtual machine size. This is because files are backed-up to external storage instead of remaining within the virtual appliance.

This page describes how to configure Votiro Cloud cluster to work with external storage.

Solution

Prerequisites

Before you start, ensure that any external storage server:

Procedure

This procedure includes instructions and verification checks to ensure that your virtual appliance is configured to work with your external storage.

Note 

When using external storage, the customer is responsible for file retention and deletion.

Files won’t be deleted according to files history retention and will be kept forever or until they are deleted manually.

Declare a Mount

To declare a mount in all of the cluster's nodes, follow these steps:

mkdir -p /data/externalfs/nfsshare

chown 1000:1000 /data/externalfs/nfsshare

chmod -R 755 /data/externalfs/nfsshare

mount -t nfs SERVER_IP:NFS_EXPORT_FOLDER /data/externalfs/nfsshare

SERVER_IP:NFS_EXPORT_FOLDER /data/externalfs/nfsshare nfs defaults 0 0

Replace the place holders above as follows:

For example:

mount -t nfs 10.130.1.97:/data/nfsshare /data/externalfs/nfsshare

Add External Storage Path

To add an external storage path to the configuration, follow these steps:

Restart Pods

kubectl delete pod -l app=mng-service-blob -n votiro

kubectl delete pod -l app=mng-blob-storage-manager -n votiro

Note

It may take up to 10 minutes for the file storage location to switch to the external configuration.

Troubleshooting

This section contains troubleshooting steps to take when encountering problems configuring external NFS storage.

Issue 1: Windows Server NFS sharing permission

Symptoms

After mounting the NFS share, when you list the /data/externalfs directory, the permissions are assigned to nobody.

[root@sfg ~]# mount -t nfs 10.10.10.50:/nfsshare /data/externalfs/nfsshare

[root@sfg ~]# ls -l /data/externalfs

total 1

drwxr-xr-x. 2 nobody nobody 64 May 12 10:47 nfsshare

Even if you try to force change the owner and group using chown 1000:1000, you will get the following error:

[root@sfg ~]# chown 1000:1000 -R /data/externalfs

chown: changing ownership of ‘/data/externalfs/nfsshare’: Permission denied

Solution

If you are using Windows Server as NFS, please follow this link to configure your Windows Server as a NFS server: Deploy Network File System

After configuring your Windows Server as a NFS server, follow these steps to allow root access on the shared folder:

[root@sfg ~]# chown 1000:1000 -R /data/externalfs

[root@sfg ~]# ls -l /data/externalfs/

total 1

drwxr-xr-x. 3 sgvotiroadmin sgvotiroadmin 3 May 11 17:12 nfsshare

Note 

In this example, sgvotiroadmin is the username that I use during the first login via putty to SFG.
Your username may vary according to what you have created during the initcluster phase.

Issue 2: Missing metadata in blob-config

Symptoms

After changing the blob-config, the metadata portion might not be able to populate correctly.

Solution

To verify the blob-config, run the following command:

kubectl edit configmap blob-config -n votiro

Scroll down to the metadata section - the externalStorageRootPath may appear blank. Edit the file to ensure that this string is present. Be careful to preserve the commas (,) before and after the string:

,"externalStorageRootPath":"/externalblobs/nfsshare",