SUPPORTING COORDINATED ACCESS TO A FILE SYSTEM'S SHARED STORAGE USING AUTOMATIC ALIGNMENT OF A PARALLEL FILE ACCESS PROTOCOL AND METADATA MANAGEMENT

摘要

Embodiments of the invention relate to supporting coordinated access to a file system's shared disk storage subsystem using an automatic alignment of a parallel file access protocol and metadata management on a per object basis. Active file servers in the cluster have equivalent access to shared data of the file system. A file server (among servers in the cluster) receives a client's request to access a file stored by the file system in the storage subsystem using a parallel file access protocol. If the file system has selected a file server to serve as a metadata manager of said file, the file server uses the selected file server to coordinate access to the file's metadata. If the file system has not selected a file server to serve as the metadata manager of the file, the file system selects the file server that received said request as the metadata manager for said file until a file close request operation is received. The file server then performs a file open request operation for the file, to the file server selected to serve as the metadata manager. The file server then opens the file and creates a file handle of the file. The file server then encodes a file server ID, of the file server selected as the metadata manager of said file, in the file handle such that the file system's file servers may identify which file server is the file's metadata manager. The file server then returns the file handle to the client for performing I/O to said file.