GPFS integration

[jasonmicron]

I have a question about GPFS integration.

If I were to have FreeNAS become a GPFS client (not sure that's even possible on a BSD-based system), and my GPFS volume is mounted via the GPFS client, is FreeNAS able to actively monitor that mount once it is exported via either NFS or CIFS? I would think so, but I wasn't sure if this had been tested.

Thanks.

 

[Chris Moore]

As far as I can tell, this is the first time that General Parallel File System (GPFS) has been mentioned on this forum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_General_Parallel_File_System

 

[Waco]

Spectrum Scale (GPFS) isn't supported on BSD. You could potentially run it in a VM...but no native support is there. If you feel like writing your own GPFS binary compatibility layer you could maybe get it working. If you do...let me know. :)

 

[jasonmicron]

Spectrum Scale (GPFS) isn't supported on BSD.

Yep, thought so, and probably never will, and barring a complete restructuring of FreeNAS it will likely also remain on BSD. That's unfortunate.

You could potentially run it in a VM

I'm going to pretend you didn't say that. :)

If you feel like writing your own GPFS binary compatibility layer you could maybe get it working. If you do...let me know. :)

I am pretty content with my current level of sanity, which is already on a thin line. I don't want to push it. :)

I suppose I just really wanted the monitoring capabilities and nice UI that FreeNAS provides to non-technical users and management types that like pretty charts and graphs. Zabbix works in a pinch, and does support some GPFS-specific features, but I was hoping for something a bit more modern in design, which FreeNAS delivers in spades.

Oh well. Thanks!

 

[Waco]

May I ask why you're inquiring about GPFS? It's not exactly a cheap product to run, so I'm surprised at the question of FreeNAS integration. GPFS already has some pretty damn good logging capabilities built-in and monitoring them is fairly trivial...

 

[jasonmicron]

I just wanted to poke around and see what it could do. Our company builds appliances that involve GPFS for enterprise HPC customers. I last toyed around with FreeNAS about a decade ago and it has come a long way since then, especially with what appear to be the monitoring and performance tracking capabilities, which is something GPFS doesn't exactly provide out of the box. It was just more of a "what can it do?" question. I wasn't considering FreeNAS as something that would actually manage the storage, just something to assist with the performance and design layouts for the exports over SMB/NFS/etc in a nice UI that we might want to hook in to for our own in-house UI.

 

[Waco]

Spectrum Control is the product you're looking for. :) The free version is anything that can interpret the perfmon tools included in GPFS/Spectrum Scale.

/HPC architect out