Steps to establishing and starting your GPFS cluster

There are several steps you must perform to establish and start your GPFS™ cluster. This topic provides the information you need for performing those steps manually.

The spectrumscale installation toolkit, available for RHEL7, automates many of the steps listed below.

You can install GPFS and deploy protocols either manually or by using the spectrumscale installation toolkit. This topic provides the information you need for establishing and starting your GPFS cluster manually. If you have already installed GPFS with the spectrumscale toolkit, these steps have already been completed.

Follow these steps to establish your GPFS cluster:

Review supported hardware, software, and limits by reviewing the IBM Spectrum Scale™ FAQ in IBM® Knowledge Center for the latest recommendations on establishing a GPFS cluster.
Install the GPFS licensed program on your system:
- For existing systems, see Migration, coexistence and compatibility.
- For new systems:
  - For your Linux nodes, see Installing GPFS on Linux nodes.
  - For your AIX® nodes, see Installing IBM Spectrum Scale on AIX nodes.
  - For your Windows nodes, see Installing IBM Spectrum Scale on Windows nodes.
Decide which nodes in your system will be quorum nodes (see Quorum ).
Create your GPFS cluster by issuing the mmcrcluster command. See GPFS cluster creation considerations.
Use the mmchlicense command to assign an appropriate GPFS license to each of the nodes in the cluster. See IBM Spectrum Scale license designation for more information.

If you used the spectrumscale installation toolkit to install GPFS, steps 2 through 5, and optionally, step 6 below have already been completed.

After your GPFS cluster has been established:

Ensure you have configured and tuned your system according to the values suggested in the Configuring and tuning your system for GPFS topic in IBM Spectrum Scale: Administration and Programming Reference.
Start GPFS by issuing the mmstartup command. For more information, see mmstartup command in IBM Spectrum Scale: Administration and Programming Reference.
Create new disks for use in your file systems by issuing the mmcrnsd command. See Network Shared Disk (NSD) creation considerations.
Create new file systems by issuing the mmcrfs command. See File system creation considerations.
Mount your file systems.
As an optional step, you can also create a temporary directory (/tmp/mmfs) to collect problem determination data. The /tmp/mmfs directory can be a symbolic link to another location if more space can be found there. If you decide to do so, the temporary directory should not be placed in a GPFS file system, as it might not be available if GPFS fails.
If a problem should occur, GPFS might write 200 MB or more of problem determination data into /tmp/mmfs. These files must be manually removed when any problem determination is complete. This should be done promptly so that a NOSPACE condition is not encountered if another failure occurs. An alternate path can be specified by issuing the mmchconfig dataStructureDump command.