The Installation Toolkit can be used to manage Spectrum Scale clusters. Toolkit makes it easy to install, deploy and upgrade clusters. It is available with Spectrum Scale's Standard, Advanced and Data Management Editions.
It helps automate different tasks and makes it easy for the administrator to perform them. It comes as a self-extracting package and provides the 'spectrumscale' command. While using the installation toolkit, the administrator needs to provide environmental information and the cluster topology. The installation toolkit then installs, configures, and deploys the optimal configuration, dynamically creating a cluster definition file.
A list of the tasks it can do are as follows:
- Simplify GPFS cluster creation.
- Automatically create Network Shared Disk (NSD) and file system stanza files.
- Create new NSD's, file systems and add new nodes.
- Single package manager for all components of a release.
- Deploys NFS, SMB and Object by automatically pulling in all the prerequisites.
- Install and Deploy File Audit Logging (FAL)
- Deploy the Spectrum Scale Graphical User Interface (GUI)
- Configure Performance Monitoring consistently across all nodes.
- Configure call home across all nodes.
- Authentication can be setup.
- Simplifies upgrade with a single command, to upgrade all components on all nodes.
The "config populate" feature helps to use toolkit for existing clusters. It eases "Upgrading" clusters that were originally not created via the toolkit. Point it at an existing node in the cluster and it will traverse the cluster and add all the nodes, NSD's, file systems, protocol details and other configuration to the toolkit.
The pre-check option is available for all the three phases and provides useful tips to the administrator before the phase is actually run.
And the post-check option does environment checks after each phase.
Many new useful features and capabilities, especially for upgrading via toolkit, have been added recently. Please see below links:
https://developer.ibm.com/storage/2018/09/30/upgrade-excluding-nodes-using-install-toolkit/https://developer.ibm.com/storage/2018/09/30/offline-upgrade-using-install-toolkit/https://developer.ibm.com/storage/2018/09/15/starting-ibm-spectrum-scale-5-0-2-release-installation-toolkit-supports-upgrade-rerun-fresh-upgrade-fails/#IBMSpectrumScale#Softwaredefinedstorage#IBMSpectrumStorage