GSSUTILS: An Introduction
As of now LBS or customer always use ESS command line tools to run SSR precheck, Install or Deploy or upgrade the ESS server by following up Quick Deployment Guide (QDG) or Deployment Guide. Running command manually is very cumbersome and most of the time user end up with some typo in CLI or missed some intermediate command causing either cluster damage or some serious cluster malfunction.
Gssutils is aimed to designed to eliminate the above problems. It’s a text based menu driven utility which can be customized depending on environment and can be run by just pressing the Enter key without doing any command line formation etc (like change ems hostname, io node names, prefix or suffix for CLI and not need to remember CLI switches).
When running Gssutils one can pass the EMS server, IO node, Prefix and Suffix while starting the tools and all the SSR, Deployment or Upgrade command will be customized to run for user provided EMS Server, IO node, Prefix and Suffix.
It also guides user to run the command in correct order as it’s a menu driven step wise user interface so that user should not remember the next CLI.
Here the GSSUTILS console looks like.



Here is the GSSUTILS command line help:

[root@ems2 ~]# gssutils -h
usage: gssutils [-h] [-N NODE-LIST | -G NODE-GROUP] [--prefix PREFIX]
[--suffix SUFFIX] [--config CONFIG_FILE] [--customize]
[--ems-node-name EMS_NODE] [--io-node-one-name IO_NODE1]
[--io-node-two-name IO_NODE2]

optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-N NODE-LIST Provide a list of nodes
-G NODE-GROUP Provide name of the node group to
--prefix PREFIX Provide hostname prefix. Use = between --suffix and
value if the value starts with -.
--suffix SUFFIX Provide hostname suffix. Use = between --suffix and
value if the value starts with -.
--config CONFIG_FILE Provide config file for gssutils for a specific
environment
--customize Customize the EMS hostname and IO node name and
generate the gssutils config file. This file can be
used with --config to run gssutils specific to an
environment.
--ems-node-name EMS_NODE
EMS hostname to populate the gssutils config file
--io-node-one-name IO_NODE1
IO Node 1 hostname to populate the gssutils config
file
--io-node-two-name IO_NODE2
IO Node 2 hostname to populate the gssutils config
file


As we can see this tool has major 5 sections:

1. SSR Tools
2. Install
3. Upgrade
4. Validation checks
5. View/Collect service data (snaps)


The SSR Tools can be used to validate the system when it just arrived to customer location and LBS teams plugged all servers and components together and GPFS cluster is ready to deploy. SSR tools will help you to validate the system interconnect like Network is correct or not, the enclosures are connected or not to IO nodes etc. It’s a primary menu item should be used by LBS or anyone before going to create the GPFS cluster.
The Install section will allow you to re-deploy the EMS along with IO nodes in case customer has cleaned up (re-imaged) the entire ESS nodes and want to restart the EMS and IO nodes deployment from scratch. This menu item is a menu driven representation install section of QDG guide.
The upgrade section will allow you to upgrade the existing ESS server to latest version of ESS software. This menu item is a menu driven representation of the upgrade section of QDG guide.
The validation check section can used once the ESS systems has been deployed and the GPFS cluster is UP and RUNNING. Using this section user can collection firmware level, run stress test on network and file system etc. It can be used a post deployment utility to validate the ESS server.
The last but not least the View/Collect service data can be used to collect the gpfs snap SOS report etc.

GSSUTILS: Pre-requisite
GSSUTILS is a part of gpfs.gss.tools-

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