Administering
- Performing GPFS administration tasks
Before you perform GPFS™ administration tasks, review topics such as getting started with GPFS, requirements for administering a GPFS file system, and common command principles. - Verifying network operation with the mmnetverify command
Verify network operation with the mmnetverify command. - Managing file systems
There are several file system management tasks outlined in this topic. - File system format changes between versions of IBM Spectrum Scale
Every GPFS file system has a format number associated with it. This format number corresponds to the on-disk data structures of the file system and is an indicator of the supported file system functionality. - Managing disks
Use the following information to manage disks in IBM Spectrum Scale™ - Managing protocol services
GPFS provides system administrators with the ability to manage the protocol services. - Managing protocol user authentication
The system administrator can configure authentication for both object and file access either during the installation of the system or after the installation. If the authentication configuration is not configured during installation, you do it manually with the mmuserauth service create command from any node in the IBM Spectrum Scale cluster. This section covers the manual method of configuring authentication for file and object access. - Managing protocol data exports
You can manage the data exports that you have created using NFS, SMB, and Object. - Managing object storage
Use the following information to use and manage the IBM Spectrum Scale for object storage features. - Managing GPFS quotas
The GPFS quota system helps you to control the allocation of files and data blocks in a file system. - Managing GUI users
GUI users of the IBM Spectrum Scale system can monitor, configure, and manage the IBM Spectrum Scale system. - Managing GPFS access control lists
Access control protects directories and files by providing a means of specifying who is granted access. GPFS access control lists are either traditional ACLs based on the POSIX model, or NFS V4 ACLs. NFS V4 ACLs are very different than traditional ACLs, and provide much more fine control of file and directory access. A GPFS file system can also be exported using NFS. - Considerations for GPFS applications
Application design must consider the exceptions to the Open Group technical standards for the stat() system call and NFS V4 ACLs. Also, a technique to check if a file system is controlled by GPFS has been provided. - Accessing a remote GPFS file system
GPFS allows users shared access to files in either the cluster where the file system was created, or other GPFS clusters. File system access by the cluster where the file system was created is implicit. - Information lifecycle management for IBM Spectrum Scale
IBM Spectrum Scale can help you achieve information lifecycle management (ILM) efficiencies through powerful policy-driven automated tiered storage management. With the ILM toolkit, you can manage sets of files and pools of storage, and you can automate the management of file data. - Creating and maintaining snapshots of file systems
A snapshot of an entire GPFS file system can be created to preserve the contents of the file system at a single point in time. Snapshots of the entire file system are also known as global snapshots. The storage overhead for maintaining a snapshot is keeping a copy of data blocks that would otherwise be changed or deleted after the time of the snapshot. - Creating and managing file clones
A file clone is a writable snapshot of an individual file. File clones can be used to provision virtual machines by creating a virtual disk for each machine by cloning a common base image. A related usage is to clone the virtual disk image of an individual machine as part of taking a snapshot of the machine state. - Scale Out Backup and Restore (SOBAR)
Scale Out Backup and Restore (SOBAR) is a specialized mechanism for data protection against disaster only for GPFS file systems that are managed by IBM Spectrum Protect™ for Space Management. - Data Mirroring and Replication
The ability to detect and quickly recover from a massive hardware failure is of paramount importance to businesses that make use of real-time data processing systems. - Implementing a clustered NFS environment on Linux
In addition to the traditional exporting of GPFS file systems using the Network File System (NFS) protocol, GPFS allows you to configure a subset of the nodes in the cluster to provide a highly-available solution for exporting GPFS file systems using NFS. - Implementing Cluster Export Services
Cluster Export Services (CES) provides highly available file and object services to a GPFS cluster by using Network File System (NFS), Object, or Server Message Block (SMB) protocols. - Identity management on Windows
GPFS allows file sharing among AIX®, Linux, and Windows nodes. AIX and Linux rely on 32-bit user and group IDs for file ownership and access control purposes, while Windows uses variable-length security identifiers (SIDs). The difference in the user identity description models presents a challenge to any subsystem that allows for heterogeneous file sharing. - Protocols cluster disaster recovery
Protocols cluster disaster recovery (DR) uses the capabilities of Active File Management (AFM) based Async Disaster Recovery (AFM DR) features to provide a solution that allows an IBM Spectrum Scale cluster to fail over to another cluster and fail back, and backup and restore the protocol configuration information in cases where a secondary cluster is not available. - File Placement Optimizer
GPFS File Placement Optimizer (FPO) is a set of features that allow GPFS to operate efficiently in a system based on a shared nothing architecture. It is useful for big data applications that process massive amounts of data. - Encryption
GPFS provides support for file encryption that ensures both secure storage and secure deletion of data. GPFS manages encryption through the use of encryption keys and encryption policies. - Managing certificates to secure communications between GUI web server and web browsers
The IBM Spectrum Scale system supports self-signed and trusted certificates that are provided by a certificate authority (CA) to secure communications between the system and web browser. - Securing protocol data
The data cannot be secured only by authenticating and authorizing the users to access the data. You also need to ensure that the communication channel that is used to raise authentication requests and data transfer is secured. The security features associated with the protocols that you use to store and access data also help to provide data in transit security for the protocol data. - Cloud services: Transparent cloud tiering and Cloud data sharing
This topic provides a brief description about managing your cloud storage using IBM Spectrum Scale. - Managing file audit logging
The following topics describe various ways to manage file audit logging in IBM Spectrum Scale. - Highly available write cache (HAWC)
Highly available write cache (HAWC) reduces the latency of small write requests by initially hardening data in a non-volatile fast storage device prior to writing it back to the backend storage system. - Local read-only cache
- Miscellaneous advanced administration topics
The following topics provide information about miscellaneous advanced administration tasks: - GUI limitations
The following are the limitations of the IBM Spectrum Scale GUI: