Installation and Setup

There are two ways to install BeeGFS: GUI-based (using a graphical Java interface) or manually (using shell commands).

The graphical installation is based on the BeeGFS Admon (“Administration and Monitoring”) service, to which the graphical Java interface connects. In general, the GUI-based installation is recommended only for inexperienced users, because it does not provide the full flexibility of a manual installation (e.g. several configuration settings are not available and installation into an image is not supported by the GUI-based installation procedure).

If you are familiar with the Linux command line, it is recommended to perform the manual installation. Of course, you can still use the graphical interface to view usage statistics after a manual installation, if you want to.

General Notes

Installation Paths

BeeGFS binaries and libraries will be installed to /opt/beegfs. The configuration files are located in the directory /etc/beegfs. Each service (including the client) comes with an init script in /etc/init.d.

Log Files

BeeGFS services create log files in /var/log.

Runtime Compatibility of different Versions

Different versions of BeeGFS clients and servers are compatible if they are part of the same major release series (e.g. all v6.x versions are part of the same major release v6).

Storage Format Compatibility

Some new major releases of BeeGFS may introduce new storage format features, which might require upgrades of on-disk data structures. Upgrade tools will be provided in these cases to convert existing data to the new format in place. See release changelog for compatibility notes.

Compiler

The GNU C compiler (gcc) must be installed on client machines to build the BeeGFS client kernel modules.

Infiniband Libraries

For native Infiniband support, you need to have the ibverbs and rdmacm libraries of OFED 1.2 or higher installed. (Most Linux distributions also ship with sufficiently recent versions of these libraries.)

GUI-based Installation and Service Management

Graphical installation is performed through the BeeGFS Admon (“Administration and Monitoring”). It consists of a Java GUI and a beegfs-admon service, to which the graphical interface connects. The beegfs-admon service uses ssh to run installation commands on the other BeeGFS nodes. Thus, passwordless ssh login from the host running the beegfs-admon service to all BeeGFS nodes for user root is required (including the node where the beegfs-admon service is running).

Note

If you don’t know how to configure ssh without password, you might want to have a look at the tool ssh-keygen to create a public/private key pair (without a passphrase) and then use ssh-copy-id to copy the new key to the other nodes, or use your favorite search engine to search for “passwordless ssh”.

Download and Installation of the Admon service

Download the appropriate BeeGFS repository file for your Linux distribution from the table below.

• Admon is the administration and monitoring service of BeeGFS.
• The Admon service typically runs on a cluster master node.

Linux Base Distribution	Version	Package Manager	Repository File (Save to…)
Red Hat Linux (and derivatives, e.g. Fedora)	6.x	yum	Download (Save to: /etc/yum.repos.d/)
	7.x