Establishing and starting your IBM Storage Scale cluster

There are several steps that you must perform to establish and start your IBM Storage Scale cluster. This topic provides the information that you need for performing those steps.

The installation toolkit, available on a few Linux® distributions, automates many of the following steps. For more information, see Installing IBM Storage Scale on Linux nodes with the installation toolkit.

You can install IBM Storage Scale and deploy protocols either manually or by using the installation toolkit. This topic provides the information that you need for establishing and starting your IBM Storage Scale cluster manually. If you have already installed IBM Storage Scale with the installation toolkit, then these steps are already completed.

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

Follow these steps to establish an IBM Storage Scale cluster:

Review supported hardware, software, and limits in the IBM Storage Scale FAQ in IBM® Documentation for the latest recommendations on establishing an IBM Storage Scale cluster.
Install the IBM Storage Scale licensed program on your system:
- For existing systems, see Upgrading.
- For new systems:
  - For your Linux nodes, see Installing IBM Storage Scale on Linux nodes and deploying protocols.
  - For your AIX® nodes, see Installing IBM Storage Scale on AIX nodes.
  - For your Windows nodes, see Installing IBM Storage Scale on Windows nodes.
Decide which nodes in your system you want to be the 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. For more information, see IBM Storage Scale license designation .

If you use the installation toolkit to install IBM Storage Scale, then steps 2 to 5 in the following procedure are completed by the installation toolkit, and step 6 can be optionally completed by the installation toolkit.

After your IBM Storage Scale cluster is established:

Ensure that you have configured and tuned your system according to the values suggested in Configuring and tuning your system for GPFS.
Start IBM Storage Scale by issuing the mmstartup command. For more information, see mmstartup command.
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 by issuing the mmmount command.
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 an IBM Storage Scale file system, as it might not be available if IBM Storage Scale fails.
If a problem occurs, IBM Storage Scale 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.