Load balancing a couple of CIFS shares

[anodos]

I'm pretty sure this isn't possible, but I thought it is worth asking. :)

I have two FreeNAS servers (A) and (B).
(A) is my primary server
(B) is a ZFS replication target

(A) has several heavily-used datasets that are relatively static and shared read-only via CIFS.
I'm tempted to reduce load on (A) by sharing these datasets on (B) as well. At present I'm planning to just map some users to (A) and others to (B).

Is there a way to dynamically load-balance between (A) and (B) for these shares/datasets for all users except the one user with admin rights over the dataset that doesn't require a libation of unicorn blood, block-pointer rewrite, or some other impossible feat?

 

[Yatti420]

Well depends on what the actual problem is.. If the box (A) can't handle the strain it's under now you could dedicate your (B) backup box?to allow this..

I would just figure out why it's slow etc and fix that..

 

[anodos]

Well depends on what the actual problem is.. If the box (A) can't handle the strain it's under now you could dedicate your (B) backup box?to allow this..

I would just figure out why it's slow etc and fix that..

Hmm... tough decision. Should I fix the actual problem or create a rube goldberg solution to work around it? The technically correct answer is that I probably just need to suck it up and get more RAM.

 

[Yatti420]

Well since we don't know your specs it's hard to speculate.. That's why the forum rules say to post your specs.. Ram is golden for FreeNAS but a slow CPU can also be a factor depending on what your doing on those datasets..

 

[anodos]

I have a spare 2U server with a bunch of intel nics in it lying around. When I have some free time at work I'll put OpenBSD/haproxy on it and do some testing with load-balancing / failover. Since I'll be exporting the CIFS shares on Server "B" as read-only I won't have to worry about things getting out-of-sync if users end up going through the load-balancer to get to other shares that have write access on Server "A".