How to do client side NFS failover in Linux?

I have a CentOS 6.3 client that needs to access NFS storage. There are two NFS servers that serve up the same content stored on a SAN with a clustered filesystem. How do I set up CentOS to failover to the backup NFS server if needed? When I Google, I keep reading that Linux does not support this, but that would be strange since there is plenty of information out there on how to set up a clustered Linux NFS server farm...

Solution 1:

That sounds like a job for the automount(8) daemon. See the autofs(5) man page (from the autofs rpm) under "Replicated Server". I believe if you add a line like

fileserv host1,host2:/server/export/point

to /etc/auto.misc on your client and (re-)start the autofs service, your NFS storage will show up under /misc/fileserv. You could add -ro as mount options if you want to mount read only (or other mount options of course).