The top 3 operational differences between EMC Isilon OneFS 6.5 and OneFS 7.0

isilon-onefs-7-0Attention all current EMC® Isilon® OneFS 6.5 users: OneFS 6.5 will reach its end of service life (EOSL) on June 30, 2015. OneFS 7.0 introduces several new features, enhancements, and operational changes. If you need to upgrade to OneFS 7.0, you might be wondering what’s different about this version and how these differences will affect your day-to-day administrative tasks. You can learn more by looking at the Administrative Differences in OneFS 7.0 white paper.

The top three changes that OneFS 6.5 users should prepare for are:

  • Administration using role-based access control (RBAC)
  • Authentication using access zones
  • Managing groups of nodes in SmartPools

Role-based access control

In OneFS 6.5, you can grant web and SSH login and configuration access to non-root users by adding them to the admin group. The admin group is replaced with the administrator role in OneFS 7.0 using RBAC. A role is a collection of OneFS privileges, usually associated with a configuration subsystem, that are granted to members of that role as they log in to the cluster.

For information about role-based access, including a description of roles and privileges, see Isilon OneFS 7.0: Role-Based Access Control.

An important note!

After you upgrade to OneFS 7.0, make sure you add existing administrators to an administrator role.

Access Zones

In OneFS 7.0, all user access to the cluster is controlled through access zones. With access zones, you can partition the cluster configuration into self-contained units and configure a subset of parameters as a virtual cluster with its own set of authentication providers, user mapping rules, and SMB shares. The built-in access zone is the “System” zone, which by default provides the same behavior as OneFS 6.5, using all available authentication providers, NFS exports, and SMB shares.

For information about access zones, see the OneFS 7.0.2 Administration Guide.

SmartPools

In OneFS 6.5, a group of nodes is called a disk pool. In OneFS 7.0, a group of nodes is called a node pool, and a group of disks in a node pool is called a disk pool. Also, Isilon nodes are automatically assigned to node pools in the cluster based on the node type. This is called autoprovisioning. Disk pools can no longer be viewed or targeted directly through the OneFS 7.0 web administration interface or the command-line interface. Instead, the smallest unit of storage that can be administered in OneFS 7.0 is a node pool. Disk pools are managed exclusively by the system through autoprovisioning.

An important note!

Before you upgrade to OneFS 7.0, you must configure disk pools into a supported node pool configuration. Disk pools must contain nodes of the same type, according to their node equivalence class. Disk pools that contain a mixture of node types must be reconfigured.

For information about how to prepare your Isilon cluster for upgrade to OneFS 7.0, see the Isilon OneFS 7.0.1 – 7.0.2 Upgrade Readiness Checklist.

For more information about OneFS 7.0

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About the Author: Kirsten Gantenbein