Administering support for GPFS

The IBM® Pattern for GPFS™ provides a clustered file system containing IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS). The pattern, using GPFS, provides single server, clustered, highly available configurations, and active-passive disaster recovery.

Overview

IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) is a high performance shared-disk file management solution that provides fast, reliable access to data from multiple nodes in a cluster environment. Applications can readily access files using standard file system interfaces, and the same file can be accessed concurrently from multiple nodes. GPFS is designed to provide high availability through advanced clustering technologies, dynamic file system management, and data replication. GPFS can continue to provide data access even when the cluster experiences storage or node malfunctions.

Using the IBM Pattern for GPFS, your system administrator can deploy a GPFS cluster, providing high-performance, highly-available storage to the middleware and applications that are deployed in your environment.

The system administrator deploys the GPFS Server pattern, attaches storage, and defines file systems.The administrator then deploys a shared service used by the deploying GPFS Clients, which directs the clients to the appropriate GPFS Server. Starting with IBM Pattern for GPFS V1.2.5.0, the clients can directly provide the GPFS Server information at deployment time, eliminating the requirement to deploy the GPFS shared service. The clients can also connect to a different GPFS Server, after deployment, by using the Connect to server operation. Using this feature that is available with GPFS Pattern V1.2.5.0 and later, you can deploy clients that point to different GPFS Servers in the same environment profile. This deployment scenario is not possible when you use the IBM shared service for GPFS since only one GPFS shared service instance can be deployed in an environment profile. When the GPFS shared service instance is used to provide GPFS Server connection information, all clients deployed in the same environment profile with the GPFS shared service instance will connect to the same GPFS Server, specified by the GPFS shared service instance.

As a result, multiple shared file systems can be deployed for different uses, and applications are directed to the specific server as determined by the administrator.

IBM Pattern for GPFS versions included with product versions
Review the information about the version of IBM Pattern for GPFS (and the corresponding IBM GPFS version) that is included with each PureApplication® System version.
GPFS deployments and topologies
The IBM Pattern for GPFS provides integrated management capabilities so you can deploy a number of different file server topologies.
Planning your GPFS deployments
When planning a GPFS deployment, you should have a basic understanding of the main parts of the deployment.
Managing GPFS patterns
You can perform a variety of tasks to manage your GPFS patterns, instances, and deployments.
Deleting GPFS instances from the cluster
Read the following information carefully before you delete a GPFS server instance.
Connecting to an external GPFS Server
You can create and add custom script packages to your GPFS Client to connect to an external GPFS Server after deployment.
Connecting to an external GPFS Tiebreaker node
You can improve your high availability environment by configuring an external GPFS Tiebreaker node, separate from your Primary and Mirror deployments.
Performing GPFS Manager operations
After your GPFS Pattern virtual applications are deployed, you can perform various operations to ensure that your applications are performing well and to update the application configuration.
Performing GPFS Client operations
After deploying your virtual application or virtual system patterns that include application components configured as GPFS Clients that use the GPFS Client Policy to connect to a GPFS Server, you can perform various operations to ensure that your clients are performing well and to update the application configuration.
Updating GPFS deployments from PureApplication System V2.0
Starting with PureApplication System V2.1.0.0, the IBM Pattern for GPFS includes GPFS V4.1. GPFS V4.1 supports a limited compatibility with GPFS V3.5 that is included in the IBM Pattern for GPFS delivered in PureApplication System V2.0.0.0. With this limited compatibility with GPFS V3.5, you can temporarily operate with a mixture of GPFS V4.1 and GPFS V3.5 deployments until you perform a rolling upgrade of your pattern instances.
Updating GPFS deployments from PureApplication System V2.1.0.0 or later
GPFS server and client instances that were deployed with PureApplication System V2.1.0.0 or later should be able to communicate with each other without updating the instances. Any GPFS server or client instance that was deployed with PureApplication System V2.1.0.0 or later cannot communicate with older instances unless these instances are first upgraded to a currently supported GPFS Pattern version.
Troubleshooting and tuning
This section provides some information to help you diagnose and resolve problems found while working with your GPFS patterns, configurations, and deployments.

Parent topic: Administering the system

Related concepts:

Administering block storage replication