Storage Requirements

Shared storage is required for files uploaded to Orchestrator, as well as for the associated MySQL data files and ACM files. The shared storage must meet the following criteria:
  • High availability (for example, with RAID arrays) to avoid a single point of failure
  • Completely reliable and accessible 100% of the time, so ACM can secure highly available Orchestrator operations and prevent data corruption.
Minimum configuration requirements are the following:
  • MySQL data: 20GB
  • ACM: 1GB
  • Orchestrator var data: 20GB
Because ACM is not migrating the mount points over failover, MySQL data, Orchestrator var data, and ACM data must be mounted and visible on both nodes simultaneously.

Shared File Systems Compatible with ACM

Aspera recommends dedicating storage for ACM whenever possible in order to avoid creating I/O bottlenecks when large packages are being transferred to shared storage at very high speeds.

ACM supports SAN and NAS external storage. However, be aware of the following limitations:

  • A SAN storage requires a cluster file system for the Aspera high availability environment to function properly. Block-level storage access will not work; only file-level storage access is suitable. Files must be visible from both nodes concurrently. If a file is changed on one node, the other node must be able to immediately incorporate the changes.
  • A storage solution with NFS Version 3 may cause problems, because NFS3 does not automatically release the locks held by a client. This is critical for MySQL, where only one node at a time may write to the shared disk. With NFS3, if the active node that is running MySQL goes down, the passive node is unlikely to be able to start MySQL when it takes over, because some MySQL files may still be locked on the shared storage. With NFS4 technology, all locks associated with a TCP session that times out will be automatically released, making MySQL automatic failover possible.
  • The NFS mount option noac must be used with the /mnt/shared/orchestrator/acm_files/ mount point for ACM to function properly.
    Important: Using noac on any mount point other than /mnt/shared/orchestrator/acm_files/ may lead to severe performance issues.

    See Mounting Remote File Systems on Each Orchestrator Server for more information.

  • CIFS is not supported.

Folders that Must be Shared

For Orchestrator on-premise high availability installation, the folders and other data sources listed below must be set up with shared external storage and shared between the nodes.
  • The run folder:
    /opt/aspera/var/run/orchestrator/
    Important run-time information is stored in this folder. For example, the file trigger history is stored here, and thus each node has the same perspective of already-triggered files. Alternatively, the history may also be kept in the shared MySQL data. In orchestrator.yml, set the parameter persistence_mode to either drive or db (both options are correct values).
  • The config folder:
    /opt/aspera/var/config/orchestrator/
    The plugin directories are present in this folder (in the actions subdirectory). Importing a plugin is done on only one node.
  • The archive folder:
    /opt/aspera/var/archive/orchestrator/
    The plugins are archived in this folder; sharing it allows the nodes to share the same view of archived plugins.
  • MySQL data from the following folder: 
    /opt/aspera/common/mysql/data
  • ACM data.
On servers that have other Aspera products installed, do not share the following folder:
/opt/aspera/var/
Instead, share the these folders:
/opt/aspera/var/config/orchestrator
/opt/aspera/var/run/orchestrator
/opt/aspera/var/archive/orchestrator