Connecting to an external IBM Storage Scale Tiebreaker node

You can improve your high availability environment by configuring an external IBM Storage Scale Tiebreaker node, separate from your Primary and Mirror deployments.

As a best practice toward ensuring high availability in your IBM Storage Scale environment, your Primary, Mirror, and Tiebreaker configurations should be located on separate systems in your environment, such that if any one IBM Storage Scale configuration becomes unavailable, the other two are unaffected and can continue to operate.

If you do not have three Cloud Pak System Software for Power® instances in your environment, you can create an external IBM Storage Scale Tiebreaker node that can perform tiebreaker functions as usual, and maintain quorum to ensure that shared file systems are available even if only one IBM Storage Scale configuration (Primary or Mirror) is available.

Your external IBM Storage Scale Tiebreaker node must have a host name defined in DNS, and must be configured to resolve the host names of each virtual machine within the virtual applications of your IBM Storage Scale Server. In addition, the IP groups that are used for the virtual applications must be able to resolve the host name of the external tiebreaker node.

The tiebreaker OS image can be different than the primary or mirror OS image.
Note: The version of the images that are used by the tiebreaker and primary nodes do not need to match exactly. However, if you use a different image for the tiebreaker, ensure that IBM Storage Scale can deploy on that image, that is, the IBM Storage Scale dependencies are on the image and IBM Storage Scale supports that image level.
The following steps describe the procedure for creating and configuring an external IBM Storage Scale Tiebreaker node.
Note: You must first configure and deploy a IBM Storage Scale Primary instance before you can perform this procedure.
  1. From the existing IBM Storage Scale Primary instance or IBM Storage Scale Mirror instance, use the IBM Storage Scale Manager operation to get an external Tiebreaker TAR file. For more information, see the Related tasks. This TAR file contains all the files that are needed to install the IBM Storage Scale Tiebreaker node on your target system.
  2. Locate the directory where the TAR file is stored locally, upload the TAR file to a temporary location on your target system, and extract all the installation files. Access the accompanying readme file for further instructions on running the installation script to create and configure the external IBM Storage Scale Tiebreaker node.
  3. Continue following the instructions in the readme file to run the Add New Member operation on your IBM Storage Scale Primary configuration, to attach the external IBM Storage Scale Tiebreaker node to the cluster.