Creating NSDs and file system as part of installing IBM Spectrum Scale on SLES 12 systems

Use this information to create NSDS and file system for installing IBM Spectrum Scale™ on SLES 12 systems.

1. Create NSDs as follows.
   1. Identify available physical disks in the /dev directory.
   2. Create the NSD stanza file to be used with the mmcrnsd command.

      For example, consider you have 2 disks, /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd, and your node name is exnode1 and it is running Linux. In this case, your NSD stanza file contents are similar to the following:

      %nsd:
      			device=/dev/sdc
      			nsd=nsd1
      			servers=exnode1
      			usage=dataAndMetadata 
      			failureGroup=-1 
      			pool=system 
      %nsd:
      			device=/dev/sdd
      			nsd=nsd2
      			servers=exnode1
      			usage=dataAndMetadata 
      			failureGroup=-1 

      Note: The server name used in the NSD stanza file must be resolvable by the system.
   3. Create the NSDs using the following command.

      # mmcrsnd –F NSD_Stanza_Filename

2. Create a GPFS file system using the following command.

   # mmcrfs fs1 -F NSD_Stanza_Filename -k nfs4

   Attention: Ensure that you do not use the same NSD stanza files that was used to create NSDs. Using the same NSD stanza file is not desirable because it results in all NSDs getting associated with one file system. If this file system gets corrupted, you can no longer access it and because all your NSDs are associated with this file system, your cluster becomes unusable.