10.4 is a fairly old version of SolidFire (10.4 was
posted on 22-Oct-2018).
Recently I was involved with adding some H610S nodes to a
10.4.0 SolidFire cluster. And I learnt a couple of things which I thought I’d
share.
1) RTFI the new H610S
nodes to 10.4.2!
There’s a KB - kb.netapp.com
- 1090191 - which mentions -
“An issue exists in the Element 10.4 RTFI process
which causes the NIC firmware to not get downgraded as it should”
- and that -
“This issue is resolved in Element 10.4.1, 10.5, and
11.0”.
10.4.2 was the highest 10.4.x version available at the
time of writing this. And from the SolidFire documentation -
- it says -
“Both the major and minor version numbers of
the software on each node in a cluster must match for the software to be
compatible.”
- so, anything 10.4.x is compatible with a 10.4.0
cluster.
Perhaps it is sensible to always use the latest x release
or P release (where x is MAJOR.MINOR.x). Not seen that recommendation anywhere
but it makes sense.
2) Use the API to add
the new nodes to the cluster with autoInstall = false
‘autoInstall = false’ will stop the automatic re-RTFI
from happening.
In the following example (this is Element 10.1.0 but it’s
what I had in a lab), we use Postman and the REST API to first ListPendingNodes.
POST to https://{{MVIP}}/json-rpc/9.0
Authorization: BasicAuth:
Username = admin / Password = ********
Body =
{
"method":
"ListPendingNodes",
"params":
{},
"id":
1
}
From the output we get the “pendingNodeID” = 2
Image: POSTMAN ListPendingNodes example
Then AddNodes.
POST to https://{{MVIP}}/json-rpc/9.0
Authorization: BasicAuth:
Username = admin / Password = ********
Body =
{
"method":
"AddNodes",
"params":
{
"pendingNodes": [2],
"autoInstall" : false
},
"id":
1
}
If all is well you should get a Status 200 OK.
Image: POSTMAN AddNodes example
And we see our node (Node ID 6) added to our SolidFire
cluster (the drives are to be added). And it’s a lot quicker than if autoInstall
was true (the default) and it went and re-RTFI-ed the node.
Image: Node added with autoInstall false
PS IMPORTANT INFORMATION:
1) Remember to give the H610S nodes a good 25 minutes
for first system initialization to complete and do not power cycle. As per this
KB: NetApp
Storage Device H610S Installation Brief
2) It is highly recommended to log a support call and
engage with SolidFire support before adding new nodes to a production SolidFire
cluster.
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