[gpfsug-discuss] Is there a difference in suspend and empty NSD state?

Bryan Banister bbanister at jumptrading.com
Wed Apr 22 23:34:33 BST 2020


Hello all,

Looking at the man page, it is fairly ambiguous as to these NSD states actually being different (and if not WHY have to names for the same thing?!):

suspend
or
empty
         Instructs GPFS to stop allocating space on the specified
         disk. Put a disk in this state when you are preparing to
         remove the file system data from the disk or if you want
         to prevent new data from being put on the disk. This is
         a user-initiated state that GPFS never enters without an
         explicit command to change the disk state. Existing data
         on a suspended disk may still be read or updated.

         A disk remains in a suspended or to be
         emptied state until it is explicitly resumed.
         Restarting GPFS or rebooting nodes does not restore
         normal access to a suspended disk.

And from the examples lower in the page:
   Note: In product versions earlier than V4.1.1, the
   mmlsdisk command lists the disk status as
   suspended. In product versions V4.1.1 and later, the
   mmlsdisk command lists the disk status as to be
   emptied with both mmchdisk suspend or mmchdisk
   empty commands.


And really what I currently want to do is suspend a set of disks, and then mark a different set of disks as "to be emptied".  Then I will run a mmrestripefs operation to move the data off of the "to be emptied" disks, but not onto the suspended disks (which will also be removed from the file system in the near future).  Once the NSDs are emptied then it will be a very (relatively) fast mmdeldisk operation.  So is that possible?

As you can likely tell, I don't have enough space to just delete both sets of disks at once during a (yay!) full file system migration to the new GPFS 5.x version.

Thought this might be useful to others, so posted here.  Thanks in advance neighbors!
-Bryan
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