Cloudera Docs

Other NFS Options

As an alternative to Azure Files NFS or Azure NetApp Files, you can configure an NFS server that is external to the Cloudera AI cluster. This is not the recommended approach.

Make sure to check the following points:

  • Cloudera AI requires an NFS service that is backed by a fully POSIX compliant file system. NFS service implemented over S3-like blob storage, such as NFS v3 over ADLS, is not supported.
  • Currently, Cloudera AI supports NFS versions 4.1 and 3. The NFS client within Cloudera AI must be able to mount the NFS storage with default options, and also assumes these export options: 
    rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_all_squash,no_subtree_check
    To prevent data loss on disk failure, it is recommended that the NFS export directory resides on a RAID disk. Before attempting to provision your Cloudera AI Workbench, create a Linux VM in the subnet you will use for Cloudera AI.
  • Before creating a Cloudera AI Workbench, the storage administrator must create a directory that will be exported to the cluster for storing Cloudera AI project files for that workbench. Either a dedicated NFS export path, or a subdirectory in an existing export must be specified for each workbench. If the directory was previously used for another workbench, there may be extraneous files remaining there. Make sure that all such remaining files are deleted.
  • Each Cloudera AI Workbench needs a unique directory that does not have files in it from a different or previous workbench. For example, if 10 Cloudera AI Workbench are expected, the storage administrator will need to create 10 unique directories. Either one NFS export and 10 subdirectories within it need to be created, or 10 unique exports need to be created.

Create a workbench in a dedicated NFS share

For example, to use a dedicated NFS share for a workbench named “workbench1” from NFS server “nfs_server”, do the following:

  1. Create NFS export directory “/workbench1”.


  2. Change ownership for the exported directory

    1. Cloudera AI accesses this directory as a user with a UID and GID of 8536.  So run chown 8536:8536 /workbench1

    2. Make the export directory group-writeable and set GID: 
chmod g+srwx /workbench1

  3. Provide the NFS export path nfs_server:/workbench1 when prompted by the Cloudera AI Control Plane App while creating the workbench.

  4. To use a subdirectory in an existing NFS share, say nfs_server:/export, do the following:

    1. Create a subdirectory /export/workbench1

    2. Change ownership: chown 8536:8536 /export/workbench1

    3. Set GID and make directory group writeable: chmod g+srwx /export/workbench1

    4. Provide the export path nfs_server:/export/workbench1 when prompted by the Cloudera AI Control Plane App.