Steps to permanently uninstall GPFS

GPFS maintains a number of files that contain configuration and file system related data. Since these files are critical for the proper functioning of GPFS and must be preserved across releases, they are not automatically removed when you uninstall GPFS.

Follow these steps if you do not intend to use GPFS on any of the nodes in your cluster and you want to remove all traces of GPFS:
Attention: After following these steps and manually removing the configuration and file system related information, you will permanently lose access to all of your current GPFS data.
  1. Unmount all GPFS file systems on all nodes by issuing the mmumount all -a command.
  2. Issue the mmdelfs command for each file system in the cluster to remove GPFS file systems.
  3. Issue the mmdelnsd command for each NSD in the cluster to remove the NSD volume ID from the device.

    If the NSD volume ID is not removed and the disk is again used with GPFS at a later time, you receive an error message when you specify the mmcrnsd command. For more information, see Disk device name is an existing NSD name.

  4. Issue the mmshutdown -a command to shutdown GPFS on all nodes.
  5. Uninstall GPFS from each node:
    • For your Linux nodes, run the de-installation program to remove GPFS for the correct version of the packages for your hardware platform and Linux distribution. For example, on SLES and Red Hat Enterprise Linux nodes:
      • rpm -e gpfs.crypto (IBM Spectrum Scale Advanced Edition or IBM Spectrum Scale Data Management Edition only)
      • rpm -e gpfs.adv (IBM Spectrum Scale Advanced Edition or IBM Spectrum Scale Data Management Edition only)
      • rpm -e gpfs.gpl
      • rpm -e gpfs.license.xx
      • rpm -e gpfs.msg.en_US
      • rpm -e gpfs.compression
      • rpm -e gpfs.base
      • rpm -e gpfs.docs
      • rpm -e gpfs.gskit
      On Ubuntu Linux nodes:
      • dpkg -P gpfs.crypto (IBM Spectrum Scale Advanced Edition or IBM Spectrum Scale Data Management Edition only)
      • dpkg -P gpfs.adv (IBM Spectrum Scale Advanced Edition or IBM Spectrum Scale Data Management Edition only)
      • dpkg -P gpfs.gpl
      • dpkg -P gpfs.license.xx
      • dpkg -P gpfs.msg.en-us
      • dpkg -P gpfs.compression
      • dpkg -P gpfs.base
      • dpkg -P gpfs.docs
      • dpkg -P gpfs.gskit
    • For your AIX® nodes:
      • installp -u gpfs
    • For your Windows nodes, follow these steps:
      1. Open Programs and Features in the Control Panel.
      2. Uninstall IBM General Parallel File System.
      3. Reboot the system.
      4. From a Command Prompt, run the following command:

        sc.exe delete mmwinserv

  6. Remove the /var/mmfs and /usr/lpp/mmfs directories.
  7. Remove all files that start with mm from the /var/adm/ras directory.
  8. Remove /tmp/mmfs directory and its content, if present.
Parent topic: Installing