Happy New Year all, One of my first projects on the new year is to get GPFS 4.2 up and running on our test cluster and begin testing it out in anticipation of upgrading our production cluster sometime later this year. We’re currently running 4.1.0.8 efix2 and are thinking of bypassing 4.1.1 altogether and going straight to 4.2.
We currently have 3 NSD servers also serving as CNFS servers and 1 NSD server that is not primary for any disks which serves as our SAMBA server. We are interested in going to CES. Yesterday I was reading in the 4.2 FAQ and came across question 8.3, “What are some of the considerations when deploying the protocol functionality?” One of the considerations is that "several GPFS configuration aspects have not been explicitly tested with the protocol functionality” and one of those functions is, “NSD server functionality and storage attached to protocol node. We recommend that Protocol nodes do not take on these functions”. Really? So it is IBM’s recommendation that we buy 3 additional very beefy (2 x hex-core processors, 256 GB RAM) servers and 3 additional server licenses just to use CES? I guess I’m very surprised by that because I’m running CNFS on 3 low end servers (1 x quad-core processor, 32 GB RAM) that also serve as NSD servers to a ~700 client HPC cluster! If we really have to buy all that, well, we probably won’t. That’s a not insignificant chunk of change. Some I’m interested in hearing feedback on both: 1) do the CES servers really have to not be NSD servers, and 2) do they really need to be such high-end boxes? And both the official party line and what you can really do in the real world if you really want to (while maintaining your support agreement with IBM) are welcome! Thanks… Kevin — Kevin Buterbaugh - Senior System Administrator Vanderbilt University - Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> - (615)875-9633
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