CLDB

Describes the Container Location Database (CLDB).

CLDB

The Container Location Database (CLDB) service tracks the following information about every container in the data-fabric file system:
  • The node where the container is located.
  • The container’s size.
  • The volume to which the container belongs.
  • The policies, quotas, and usage for that volume.

For more information on containers, see File System.

The CLDB also tracks fileservers in the cluster and node activity. Running the CLDB service on multiple nodes distributes lookup operations across those nodes for load balancing, and also provides high availability.

When a cluster runs the CLDB service on multiple nodes, one node acts as the primary CLDB and the others act as secondary instances. The primary node has read and write access to the filesystem, while secondary nodes only have read access. The kvstore (key-value store) container has the container ID 1, and holds cluster-related information. The ZooKeeper tracks container information for the kvstore container. The CLDB assigns a container ID to each new container it creates. The CLDB service tracks the location of containers in the cluster by the container ID.

When a client application opens a file, the application queries the CLDB for the container ID of the root volume’s name container. The CLDB returns the container ID and the IP addresses of the nodes in the cluster where the replicas of that container are stored. The client application looks up the volume associated with the file in the root volume’s name container, then queries the CLDB for the container ID and IP addresses of the nodes in the cluster with the name container for the target volume. The target volume’s name container has the file ID and inode for the target file. The client application uses this information to open the file for a read or write operation.

Each fileserver heartbeats to the CLDB periodically, at a frequency ranging anywhere from 1-3 seconds depending on the cluster size, to report its status and container information. The CLDB may raise alarms based on the status communicated by the FileServer.