Administrator Guide

BeeGFS High Capacity Storage solution architecture
9 Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS High Capacity Storage | ID 424
3.1 Management server
The single management server is connected to the MDS pair and SS pair through an internal 1 GbE network.
BeeGFS provides a tool called beegfs-mon that collects use and performance data from the BeeGFS
services and stores the data in a timeseries database called InfluxDB
. beegfs-mon provides predefined
Grafana panels that can be used out of the box to extract and visualize this data. Both Grafana and InfluxDB
are installed on the management server. After starting and enabling InfluxDB and Grafana server services,
Grafana dashboard can be accessed using the url http://<IP of mgmt.>:3000. The default credentials are
admin/admin.
3.2 Metadata servers
Each MDS in the MDS pair is equipped with two dual-port 12 Gb/s SAS host bus adapters and one Mellanox
InfiniBand HDR100 adapter. Figure 3 shows the recommended slot assignments for the SAS HBAs as slots 1
and 4. This allows each SAS HBA to be mapped to one processor in the server for load balancing. The
Mellanox InfiniBand HDR100 HCA is installed in slot 8, which is a PCIe x16 slot.
MDS slot priority and ME4024 SAS ports
The beegfs-mgmtd service in the BeeGFS high capacity solution is not actually running on the management
server. It is managed by Pacemaker
to run on either metaA or metaB. Its storage is on the first meta partition
on metaA server and will move together with beegfs-mgmtd service in case of a service failure. The
beegfs-mgmtd service is set up on both metadata servers and is started on the metaA server. The beegfs
mgmtd store is initialized on the directory mgmtd on the metadata target 1 as follows:
/opt/beegfs/sbin/beegfs-setup-mgmtd -p /beegfs/metaA-numa0-1/mgmtd -S beegfs-
mgmt
The two PowerEdge R740 servers that are used as the MDS are directly attached to the PowerVault ME4024
storage array housing the BeeGFS MDTs and MGMTD. Refer to Appendix A Storage array cabling for details
on how the metadata servers are cabled to the ME4024 storage array.