Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Storage (general) > Dell PowerScale: Considerations and Best Practices for Large Clusters > Cluster administration and management considerations
There are three access methods for configuring and administering a OneFS powered cluster:
While the Web Interface is the most intuitive, menu driven, and simple to use cluster administration method, it is also the most limited in terms of scope. The CLI has a more comprehensive set of administrative commands than the WebUI, making it a popular choice for OneFS power users.
Additionally, OneFS also provides native support for perl, Python, and UNIX shell scripts, which can be useful for automating management of large clusters. Creating scripts that use the OneFS platform API helps also avoids challenges with the CLI and WebUI in parsing large numbers of configuration policies – for example, tens of thousands of NFS exports. PlatformAPI calls can easily be scripted using ‘curl’ or ‘wget’ from UNIX/Linux or using the Windows Powershell ‘Invoke-RestMethod’ cmdlet.
Some administration considerations include:
Platform API responses can become slow if a large cluster is heavily overloaded. Under these conditions, a syslog message along the following lines will be displayed: “OneFS API is temporarily unavailable. Try your request again.“ This can be mitigated by tuning the number of isi_papi_d child processes.
For example:
# isi_gconfig -t papi proc.max_children=80 && isi_for_array "killall HUP isi_papi_d"
Further information about the OneFS admin interfaces is available at: