Setting up the installer node

The first step in using the installation toolkit for installing IBM Storage Scale and deploying protocols is to configure your installer node.

A good candidate for your installer node is the GPFS admin node because a prerequisite of this node is that it must be able to communicate with all other nodes without the need to provide a password. Also, SSH connections between the admin node and all other nodes must be set up to suppress prompting. Therefore, no prompts for password must display when you are using SSH among any cluster nodes to and from each other, and to and from the server.

Note: Before you configure a SLES or an Ubuntu node as the installer node, ensure that the supported version of Ansible® is installed on that node. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux® nodes, the installation toolkit installs the supported version of Ansible. For more information, see Supported Ansible version.

Tip: Ensure that there is at least 5 GB of free space on the node to download, extract, and install the packages.

Change the directory to where the installation toolkit is extracted. The default extraction path for 5.2.0.x is as follows. This path varies depending on the version.
```
cd /usr/lpp/mmfs/5.2.0.x/ansible-toolkit
```
Configure the installer node by issuing the following command:
```
./spectrumscale setup -s InstallNodeIP -i SSHIdentity
```
The -s argument identifies the IP address that nodes use to retrieve their configuration. This IP address is associated with a device on the installer node. This validation is automatically done during the setup phase.
Note: If there are multiple subnets in your cluster, it is recommended to specify a private IP address with the ./spectrumscale setup -s command.

Optionally, you can specify a private SSH key to be used to communicate with nodes in the cluster definition file, by using the -i argument.
In an Elastic Storage Server (ESS) cluster, if you want to use the installation toolkit to install IBM Storage Scale and deploy protocols, you must specify the setup type as ess while setting up the installer node as follows.
```
./spectrumscale setup -s InstallNodeIP -i SSHIdentity -st ess
```
For more information, see ESS awareness with the installation toolkit.
If you want to use the installation toolkit to install IBM Storage Scale Erasure Code Edition, you must specify the setup type as ece while setting up the installer node as follows.
```
./spectrumscale setup -s InstallNodeIP -i SSHIdentity -st ece
```
For more information, see IBM Storage Scale Erasure Code Edition documentation.