CIFS clustering through load balancer

This topic describes the steps to configure CIFS clustering through the load balancer.

Setting up a CIFS cluster involves configuring the Balance application and the HAProxy load balancer.

Balance is a load balancing solution for simple TCP proxy with round robin load balancing and fail over mechanisms.

Configure Balance.
For Linux from Source:
1. Download Balance from the Balance download page.
  Ensure that building toolchains specific to your OS version are installed. For example, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU make, or any other related packages.
2. Run the following commands to install Balance:
```
make
make install
```
  This installs Balance at /usr/sbin/ and the man page at /usr/man/man1.
3. Enable Balance to bind on port 445 of the local IPv4 IP address and distribute connections to <host1_IP>, port 445, and <host2_IP>, port 445.
```
#balance -fb ::ffff:<IP>  445 <host1_IP>:445 % <host2_IP>:445
```
  where <IP> is the local IPv4 IP address, <host1_IP> is the IPv4 address of the first server hostname, and <host2_IP> is the IPv4 address of the second server hostname.

Configure HAProxy.

To configure HAProxy on Solaris 11.2, download the appropriate version of HAProxy in accordance to your server (x86 or Sparc).
For example, haproxy-1.4.18-pcre-solaris10-x86.stripped.gz.
Get Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) and its dependencies from http://www.pcre.org/.
1. Unzip the PCRE library.
```
gunzip prce-x.x.tar.gz
 tar xf prce-x-x.tar
cd prce-x.x
```
2. Run the following commands:
```
./configure --enable-static --enable-shared --prefix=/usr/local--enable-unicode-properties
make && make install
```
Create a new user and group with name haproxy.

Run the following commands:

gunzip haproxy-1.4.x-pcre-solaris10-x86.stripped.gz
mv haproxy-1.4.x-pcre-solaris10-x86.stripped haproxy
mv haproxy /usr/bin/
chmod +x /usr/bin/haproxy
mkdir -p /etc/haproxy

Create and edit the /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg configuration file by adding the configuration shown below:

global
    log 127.0.0.1  local0 notice
    user haproxy
    group  haproxy
    chroot /etc/haproxy #directory
    daemon
    nbproc  7
    pidfile /var/run/haproxy.pid

defaults
      log global
      option tcplog
      option redispatch
      contimeout     3000
      clitimeout     5000
      srvtimeout     5000

listen hostname  <IP>:445
      mode tcp
      balance roundrobin
      server hostname <host1_IP>:445 weight  77
      server hostname <host2_IP>:445 weight 179

Note: Make sure you have /usr/bin in your environment path.

Run HAProxy with the following command:
```
haproxy -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg -D
```

When a proxy is used for mapping the CIFS drive, CIFS clients from multiple IP addresses access SkyVault CIFS through the same IP address. To ensure that SkyVault CIFS is aware that all client IP addresses used for accessing CIFS will use the same IP address (address of your proxy/load balancer), set the following property in the SkyVault-global.properties file, on all SkyVault nodes in the cluster:

cifs.loadBalancerList = <IP address of the Load Balancer>

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