4.3 GPFS requirements

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This section describes the hardware and the software needed to run GPFS.

4.3.1 Hardware requirements

Table 4-1 describes the necessary hardware configurations to run GPFS on Linux. Table 4-1 also describes hardware configurations for older versions of GPFS for illustration purposes.

Table 4-1: Hardware requirements for GPFS
GPFS version	Machine mode	Minimum memory	Maximum GPFS cluster size	Disk subsystem
1.1.0	xSeries (IA32) models x330 and x340	256 MB	32 nodes	IBM TotalStorage FAStT500
1.1.1	xSeries (IA32) models x330, x340, x342, and Cluster 1300	256 MB	32 nodes	IBM TotalStorage FAStT500
1.2	xSeries (IA32) models x330, x340, x342, and Cluster 1300	256 MB	128 nodes	IBM TotalStorage FAStT200HA and FAStT500
1.3	xSeries (IA 32) models x330, x335, x342, x345, Cluster 1300, and Cluster 1350	256 MB	256 nodes	IBM Total Storage FAStT200HA and FAStT700

Important:

This list only includes the IBM hardware that has been tested with GPFS. Other devices may work as well, but may not be supported until officially tested. For the most current information about supported hardware, refer to the following Web site:

http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/clusters/software/gpfs.html

4.3.2 Software requirements

This section lists the GPFS software requirements.

Kernel

GPFS Release 1.3.0 is supported today on the Red Hat Linux 7.3 distribution with a minimum kernel of 2.4.18-3, as distributed and supported by Red Hat (at the time this book is written).

Periodic updates of the portability layer to support additional kernel levels may be found at:

http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/projects/gpfs/

Table 4-2 shows what distributions and kernel levels GPFS runs. Table 4-2 also describes kernel levels for older versions of GPFS for illustration purposes.

Table 4-2: GPFS versions and kernel levels
GPFS version	Linux distribution	Kernel level
1.1.0	Red Hat 7.1	2.4.2-2
1.1.1	Red Hat 7.1	2.4.2-2 2.4.3-12
1.2	Red Hat 7.1	2.4.2-2 2.4.3-12 2.4.9-12
1.3	Red Hat 7.3	2.4.18-3 2.4.18-4 2.4.18-5 2.4.18-10
1.3	SuSE SLES 7	2.4.18-64GB-SMP

Note

Red Hat Linux 7.2 is not supported by IBM when running on xSeries 335 and 345 models. For additional information, refer to the following site:

http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/compat/nos/redchat.html

Linux Kernel Crash Dump

If the Linux distribution does not automatically include the Linux Kernel Crash Dump (LKCD) facility, it is important to install it, because IBM service may request a memory dump of the machine at the point-of-failure in the case of a crash in kernel.

This package may be found at the following Web site:

http://lkcd.sourceforge.net/

Other dependencies

As GPFS 1.3 is designed to run on a Red Hat and SuSE Linux, here we provide a list of packages for these Linux operating systems, as shown in Table 4-3.

Table 4-3: Other dependencies
Package	Release
GNU C library (glibc)	2.2.4 or higher (Red Hat) 2.2.2-62 or higher (SuSE)
Korn Shell (pdksh)	5.2.14 or higher (Red Hat and SuSE)
GNU C compiler (gcc)	2.96.81 or compatible (Red Hat) 2.95.3-99 or higher (SuSE)

Required IBM packages

There are two cases to consider:

GPFS installed on a cluster managed by CSM
GPFS installed on a cluster where CSM is not installed

The IBM Cluster 1350 ships with CSM to provide management of the cluster.

Install GPFS on a cluster installed without CSM

To install GPFS on a cluster without CSM, then it is mandatory to install the following packages on all of the GPFS nodes:

src-1.2-0
rsct.core-2.3-0
rsct.core.utils-2.3-0
rsct.basic-2.3-0

See Appendix A, "SRC and RSCT" on page 253 for more information about these packages.

Install GPFS on a cluster installed with CSM

In this case, CSM had already installed the SRC and RSCT packages on all the nodes. As these packages are common between CSM and GPFS, it is not necessary to install these packages again.

Only one package is not mandatory to the CSM installation, and it is possible that the CSM cluster nodes do not have this package installed. If this is the case, then this package has to be installed on all future GPFS cluster nodes. The package not installed by default by CSM is rsct.basic-2.3-0.

Attention:

Keep in mind that all the nodes in a CSM or a GPFS cluster need to run the same level of SRC and RSCT packages. This means that it is impossible to run GPFS on the CSM Management Server, because this server has a different version the RSCT package installed on it (the csm.server package adds some resources to RMC).

GPFS packages

After the SRC and RSCT packages, GPFS needs the packages discussed in the following list to finish the installation.

The following shows the version of packages installed for GPFS Release 1.3.0:

gpfs.msg.en_US-1.3-0
gpfs.base-1.3-0
gpfs.gpl-1.3-0
gpfs.docs-1.3-0

The gpfs.gpl-1.3-0 package is the only package that is needed to build GPFS open source portability layer. It has no effect on GPFS operation and is needed only by the node that is going to build the portability layer.

The gpfs.docs-1.3-0 package is not required for the operation of GPFS, but we recommend it, because it includes the man pages and documentation of GPFS commands.

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