Saturday 20 April 2013

A Node By Ay Other Name


One of the great things about the Isilon architecture is that you can add and remove nodes from your cluster.  

Let’s say you have a cluster of three 12000X nodes and you want to replace then with three new x200 nodes, now you could leave the original nodes in the cluster as a lower / slower tier of storage and make use of the SmartPools technology to place you different data types on the most appropriate nodes, or you could simply replace you old nodes with new ones.

  • Suppose my cluster has three 12000X nodes zeus-1, zeus2 and zeus3.
  • I add three X200 nodes into the cluster, which are assigned the names zeus-4, zeus-5 and zeus-6.
  • I decide to retire / SmartFail the 12000X nodes and now have a cluster with just three nodes named zeus-4, zeus-5 and zeus-6. 

I could leave things exactly as they are, but I’d rather have my three nodes with names zeus-1, zeus-2 and zeus-3; no problem I can renamed then (without downtime) using the isi conf command.

From an ssh window, launch isi conf

zeus-4# isi conf
  
zeus >>> lnnset 4 1
  
Node 4 changed to Node 1. Change will be applied on 'commit'

zeus >>> commit
 

Commit succeeded.
zeus-4# 
  
As you can see in the above, you may need to reconnect to your ssh session before the new node name is automatically changed. 

zeus-4#

zeus-4# hostname

zeus-1