New here

So we upgraded some of our servers to RHEL 6.5 from 6.2 and I came across pNFS while reading through the release docs. According to various docs available online, the performance improvement is huge over traditional NFS. Sadly, the docs available online about configuring pNFS are not very helpful. I have just this one question:

Do we need a separate Metadata server to use pNFS? Example: If I have one NFS server and 10 clients in traditional NFS setup, do I need to have one NFS server, one Metadata server and those 10 clients if I am to implement pNFS there?

Thanks in advance.

As RHEL provides kernel and user land support for pNFS the first step would be to consult its documentation. From an architecture point of view I would say "yes" for the simple reason other similar file systems all work with one or more meta data servers. Kind of makes sense as you wouldn't want to have the same storage devices spend time on network and disk I/O for both lookups and file serving...