Designating NICs for Data Fabric

Explains how to assign IP address blocks for data-fabric.

By default, filesystem instances and the CLDB nodes advertise all the available IP addresses, and data-fabric automatically uses all available network interface cards (NICs) on each node for all communication. For nodes that have multiple NICs, data-fabric supports segregation of NICs such that certain IPs can be used for clients/communication within the cluster and certain IPs can be used for clients/communication from/to outside the cluster. Also, NICs can be segregated for specific (high-performance and/or low-performance) clients within the cluster.

For example, if you use multiple NICs of mixed speeds (such as 1GbE and 10GbE) on each node, you might want to separate them to two different networks depending on the Ethernet card speeds. You can assign IP addresses in the same network to the NICs of 1GbE and assign IP addresses in another network to the NICs of 10GbE. That way, you can use the faster NICs for communication within the cluster or for certain high-performance clients (for example, FUSE-based POSIX client) and the slower NICs for external communication or for low-performance clients/jobs.

To illustrate this arrangement, the following diagram shows six nodes on a data-fabric cluster, each with a 1GbE NIC (eth0) and a 10GbE NIC (eth1). All the 1GbE NICs are networked together and connected to Network B. Likewise, all the 10GbE NICs are networked together (as part of a subnet written as 10.10.10.0/24 in CIDR notation) and connected to Network A, where peak performance is required. ClientA, which is within the cluster, communicates with cluster nodes over Network A and clients outside the cluster communicate with cluster nodes over Network B. The illustration also shows ClientB, which is a low-performance client inside the cluster, communicating with cluster nodes over Network B.



Data Fabric provides two environment variables, MAPR_SUBNETS and MAPR_EXTERNAL, which can be used to segregate NICs for internal and external clients or to segregate NICs for high-performance and low-performance clients.

About MAPR_SUBNETS Environment Variable

The MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable can be used to restrict data-fabric to a subset of NICs. If MAPR_SUBNETS is not set, all IPs are available for all communication. When MAPR_SUBNETS is set on:

  • filesystem nodes, filesystem registers these IP addresses with CLDB as internal IP addresses on which filesystem nodes can be reached.
  • CLDB nodes, CLDB advertises the IP address to clients on the cluster.

You can set the MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable in the /opt/mapr/conf/env_override.sh file on all the nodes. On the cluster nodes, the value for this environment variable is a comma-separated list of subnet masks. For example:

export MAPR_SUBNETS=10.10.15.0/24,10.10.16.0/24

You can specify up to four NICs in the MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable. If your system has more than four NICs, data-fabric advertises the first four it finds or if MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable is set, data-fabric restricts the networks/IPs that are advertised based on the subnets specified therein.

The MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable can be set on the client if there is a NAT between the server and client. On the client, the value for this environment variable is an IP address of the client. For example:

export MAPR_SUBNETS=10.11.12.13/32

When specifying the IP address in the MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable on the client, use /32 to specify a single IP address.

For more information on the MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable, see Environment Variables.

About MAPR_EXTERNAL Environment Variable

If all the IP addresses on the servers are public and can be accessed from an external system, the MAPR_EXTERNAL environment variable need not be set. However, if your cluster nodes have private IP addresses, to allow clients outside the cluster to reach the cluster nodes (such as when data-fabric is installed on the cloud or Docker container), specify the public IP addresses in the MAPR_EXTERNAL environment variable.

On the cluster nodes, you can set this variable in the /opt/mapr/conf/env_override.sh file. When MAPR_EXTERNAL is set on:

  • filesystem nodes, filesystem registers these IP addresses with CLDB as the IP addresses on which external clients can reach filesystem nodes. Communication between filesystem nodes on the cluster still occurs over the internal IP addresses.
  • CLDB nodes, CLDB advertises these IPs addresses to clients outside the cluster or data center.
  • MAST Gateway nodes, the gateway registers these IP addresses with CLDB as the IP addresses on which external clients can reach the MAST Gateway.
Note: Do not set the MAPR_EXTERNAL environment variable on the client(s).

The value for this environment variable is a comma-separated list of IP addresses; you cannot specify the hostname as value. For example:

ip1,ip2,ip3;

For example, you can specify the IP addresses of the 1GbE NICs (shown in the previous illustration) as the value for this environment variable, to allow external or low-performance clients to communicate with the cluster nodes.

export MAPR_EXTERNAL=10.11.0.0

For more information on the MAPR_EXTERNAL environment variable, see Environment Variables.

About IP Addresses for ZooKeeper Nodes

You can specify the IP addresses of ZooKeeper nodes by running the configure.sh utility with both the -Z and -EZ options during cluster configuration and list the:

  • Internal IP addresses with the -Z option
  • External IP addresses with the -EZ option

When you specify the IP addresses using the -Z and -EZ options, these IP addresses are registered with CLDB and included in the cldb.conf file. In the cldb.conf file, the internal IP addresses set using the -Z option are the values for the cldb.zookeeper.servers parameter. The external IP addresses set using the -EZ option are the values for the cldb.external.zookeeper.servers parameter.

Note: You do not need to run the configure.sh command with the -EZ option during client configuration.

For more information, see configure.sh.

If all the ZooKeepers have different IP addresses, port forwarding is not required and, optionally, you can specify the same port with all the IP addresses. However, in some cases, such as when there is a single external IP address being used by multiple ZooKeepers (as in a Docker container), you can specify ports for ZooKeepers when you run the configure.sh utility with the -Z and -EZ options. For more information, see Specifying Ports.

About Internal and External Clients

Clients communicating with CLDB using internal IP address (of CLDB) are considered internal clients (or clients within the cluster) and clients communicating with CLDB using external IP address (of CLDB) are considered external clients (or clients outside the cluster).

To configure a client as an internal or high-performance client, include CLDB’s internal IP address in the mapr-clusters.conf file on the client host. Similarly, to configure a client as an external or low-performance client, include CLDB’s external IP address in the mapr-clusters.conf file on the client host.

The mapr-clusters.conf file on the client host should not contain both internal and external IP addresses of the server on a cluster. The mapr-clusters.conf file can contain internal and external IP addresses only when the entries in the file on the client host are for multiple clusters. For example, suppose a client, which is an internal client on one cluster and external client on another cluster. The mapr-clusters.conf file on the client host can contain CLDB’s internal IP address for the cluster on which the client is considered an internal client and CLDB’s external IP address for the cluster on which the client is considered an external client.

Note: The mapr-clusters.conf file on the cluster nodes should not contain any external IP address.

Limitations

If:

  • Both MAPR_SUBNETS and MAPR_EXTERNAL environment variables are set, segregation of NICs for internal and external communication is possible. Internal communication happens over the IP addresses listed in the MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable and external communication happens over the IP addresses listed in the MAPR_EXTERNAL environment variable.
  • Only MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable is set, filesystem registers the IP addresses (in the MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable) with CLDB as internal IPs.
Note: Set both the environment variables in the /opt/mapr/conf/env_override.sh file to segregate internal or high performance clients, and external or low-performance clients.

You can specify up to 4 IP addresses in the MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable, and 4 IP addresses in the MAPR_EXTERNAL environment variable.

Note: You must configure ZooKeeper with an IP address that is reachable by both internal and external clients.

Summary

The following table describes the environment variables to set for the various services that use non-default ports and that support public IP address(es) for communication with external clients and remote clusters:

Service Environment variable to set...
Public IP Address for External Clients/Remote Clusters Non-default Port
CLDB MAPR_EXTERNAL CLDB_EXTERNAL_RPC_PORT
filesystem MAPR_EXTERNAL MAPR_EXTERNAL
MAST Gateway MAPR_EXTERNAL MASTGATEWAY_EXTERNAL_RPC_PORT

The following illustration shows the client communicating with CLDB, data-fabric filesystem, and MAST Gateway using the IP address(es) defined in the MAPR_EXTERNAL environment variable because all the IP addresses on the servers are not public and accessible outside the cluster. All communication between CLDB, filesystem, and MAST Gateway on the same cluster happen over the IP address specified in the MAPR_SUBNETS environment variable because communication between the services and clients on the cluster is restricted to a subset of the available NICs.

When the client connects to the data-fabric filesystem from outside the cluster, the client uses either the default port (5660) or the port specified for the data-fabric filesystem in the MAPR_EXTERNAL environment variable. When communicating with CLDB, if the CLDB_EXTERNAL_RPC_PORT environment variable is set, the client communicates with CLDB over the port specified in this environment variable. Similarly for MAST Gateway, if the MASTGATEWAY_EXTERNAL_RPC_PORT environment variable is set, the client communicates with MAST Gateway over the port specified in this environment variable. For both CLDB and MAST Gateway, if the ports are not set in the CLDB_EXTERNAL_RPC_PORT and MASTGATEWAY_EXTERNAL_RPC_PORT environment variables respectively, the client communicates over the default port.



The following illustration shows that during mirroring and other cross-cluster activities, the services on the destination cluster communicate with the services on the source cluster using the IP address defined in the MAPR_EXTERNAL environment variable. Similar to the external client, the services and clients in the remote destination cluster communicate with the services in the source cluster over the default ports or the port specified in the environment variable for the service.