In the rapidly evolving landscape of technology, we find ourselves on the brink of a major technological leap with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into our daily lives. The potential impact of AI on the global economy is staggering, with forecasts predicting a whopping $13 trillion contribution. While the idea of AI isn't entirely new in the security sector which has previously employed analytics to monitor and report pixel changes in CCTV footage, the integration of AI technologies such as machine and deep learning has opened up a world of possibilities. One particularly rich source of data that organizations are eager to harness is video data, which is pivotal in a variety of use cases including operational improvements for retail, marketing strategies, and the enhancement of overall customer experiences.

Industries across the board are exploring AI's ability to enhance business efficiency, underscored by a whopping 63% of enterprise clients considering their security data as mission critical. That said, the success of AI deployments hinges on the collection and storage of data. AI models thrive on large, diverse datasets to achieve effectiveness and accuracy. For instance, when analyzing traffic patterns within a city, having access to comprehensive data spanning multiple seasons allows for more accurate planning. This necessity has led to the emergence of exceptionally large storage volumes to cater to AI's insatiable appetite for data.

A considerable portion of data – approximately 80% – collected by organizations is unstructured, including video data. Data scientists are faced with the arduous task of mapping this unstructured data into their models, thanks in part to the fragmented nature of security solutions. Shockingly, over 79% of a data scientists’ time is consumed by data wrangling and collection rather than actual data analysis due to siloed data storage. Complex scenarios involving thousands of cameras pointed at different targets further complicate the application of AI models to this data.

Recent discussions in the field of AI have introduced the concept of ‘Data Fuzion,’ which underscores the importance of consolidating and harmonizing data, overcoming the current infrastructure's obstacles, and making data more accessible and usable for data science applications in the security industry. There is a significant divide between the potential for data science solutions to drive business outcomes and the actual implementation, largely attributed to – as previously mentioned – the fragmented, siloed nature of data storage and the scarcity of in-house data science expertise.

The AI solutions available today in the security domain often come as black box offerings with pre-programmed models, however end-users are increasingly seeking low- or no-code AI tools that allow them to tailor and modify models to meet their specific organizational needs. This shift enables organizations to fine-tune AI to their precise requirements, further optimizing business outcomes. Additionally, the rise of cloud computing has presented budgetary challenges as organizations are increasingly paying for data access, leading to a trend of cloud repatriation – moving data back to on-premises environments to better manage costs and reduce latency in real-time applications.

AI is transforming the way organizations protect not only their external security but also their internal data. Dell Technologies, for example, offers a solution known as Ransomware Defender within its unstructured data offerings, an AI-based detection tool which identifies anomalies and takes action when malicious actors attempt to encrypt or delete data by modeling typical behaviors and sounding alarms when suspicious activities occur. Check out the Dell Technologies cyber security solution page for more information.

To fully harness the power of AI and navigate these complex data landscapes, organizations are turning to single-volume unstructured data solutions that embody the concept of ‘Data Fuzion.’ Dell Technologies Unstructured Data Solutions, with their petabyte-scale single-volume architecture, offer not only the ability to support this burgeoning workload but also robust cyber protection and multi-cloud capabilities. In this way, organizations can chart a seamless path towards AI adoption while ensuring data-driven security and efficiency. Visit the Dell Technologies PowerScale solutions page to learn more.

Resources

• Dell Security Services
• Dell PowerScale

Authors: Mordekhay Shushan | Safety and Security Solution Architect & Brian Stonge | Business Development Manager, Video Safety and Security

Earlier in this series, we took a look at the architecture of the new OneFS WebUI SSO functionality. Now, we move on to its management and troubleshooting.

As we saw in the previous article, once the IdP and SP are configured, a cluster admin can enable SSO per access zone using the OneFS WebUI by navigating to Access > Authentication providers > SSO. From here, select the desired access zone and click the ‘Enable SSO’ toggle:

Or from the OneFS CLI using the following syntax:

# isi auth sso settings modify --sso-enabled 1

Once complete, the SSO configuration can be verified from a client web browser by browsing to the OneFS login screen. If all is operating correctly, redirection to the ADFS login screen will occur. For example:

After successful authentication with ADFS, cluster access is granted and the browser session is redirected back to the OneFS WebUI .

In addition to the new SSO WebUI pages, OneFS 9.5 also adds a subcommand to the ‘isi auth’ command set for configuring SSO from the CLI. This new syntax includes:

• isi auth sso idps
• isi auth sso settings  
• isi auth sso sp

With these, you can use the following procedure to configure and enable SSO using the OneFS command line.

1. Define the ADFS instance in OneFS.

Enter the following command to create the IdP account:

# isi auth ads create <domain_name> <user> --password=<password> ...

where:

2. Next, add the IdP to the pertinent OneFS zone. Note that each of a cluster’s access zone(s) must have an IdP configured for it. The same IdP can be used for all the zones, but each access zone must be configured separately.

# isi zone zones modify --add-auth-providers

For example:

# isi zone zones modify system --add-auth-providers=lsa-activedirectoryprovider:idp1.isilon.com

3. Verify that OneFS can find users in Active Directory.

# isi auth users view idp1.isilon.com\\<username>

In the output, ensure that an email address is displayed. If not, return to Active Directory and assign email addresses to users.

4. Configure the OneFS hostname for SAML SSO.

# isi auth sso sp modify --hostname=<name>

Where <name> is the name that SAML SSO can use to represent the OneFS cluster to ADFS. SAML redirects clients to this hostname.

5. Obtain the ADFS metadata and store it under /ifs on the cluster.

In the following example, an HTTPS GET request is issued using the 'curl' utility to obtain the metadata from the IDP and store it under /ifs on the cluster.

# curl -o /ifs/adfs.xml https://idp1.isilon.com/FederationMetadata/2007-06/ FederationMetadata.xml

6. Create the IdP on OneFS using the ‘metadata-location’ path for the xml file in the previous step.

# isi auth sso idps create idp1.isilon.com --metadata-location="/ifs/adfs.xml"

7. Enable SSO:

# isi auth sso settings modify --sso-enabled=yes -–zone <zone>

Use the following syntax to view the IdP configuration:

# isi auth sso idps view <idp_ID>

For example:

# isi auth sso idps view idp
ID: idp
Metadata Location: /ifs/adfs.xml
Entity ID: https://dns.isilon.com/adfs/services/trust
Login endpoint of the IDP
URL: https://dns.isilon.com/adfs/ls/
Binding: wrn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:bidings:HTTP-Redirect
Logout endpoint of the IDP
URL: https://dns.isilon.com/adfs/ls/
Binding: wrn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:bidings:HTTP-Redirect
Response URL: -
Type: metadata
Signing Certificate: -
        Path:
        Issuer: CN-ADFS Signing – dns.isilon.com
        Subject: CN-ADFS Signing – dns.isilon.com
        Not Before: 2023-02-02T22:22:00
        Not After: 2024-02-02T22:22:00
        Status: valid
Value and Type
        Value: -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MITC9DCCAdygAwIBAgIQQQQc55appr1CtfPNj5kv+DANBgkqhk1G9w8BAQsFADA2
<snip>

Troubleshooting

If the IdP and/or SP Signing certificate happens to expire, users will be unable to login to the cluster with SSO and an error message will be displayed on the login screen.

In this example, the IdP certificate has expired, as described in the alert message. When this occurs, a warning is also displayed on the SSO Authentication page, as shown here:

To correct this, download either a new signing certificate from the identity provider or a new metadata file containing the IdP certificate details. When this is complete, you can then update the cluster’s IdP configuration by uploading the XML file or the new certificate.

Similarly, if the SP certificate has expired, the following notification alert is displayed upon attempted login:

The following error message is also displayed on the WebUI SSO tab, under Access > Authentication providers > SSO, along with a link to regenerate the metadata file:

The expired SP signing key and certificate can also be easily regenerated from the OneFS CLI:

# isi auth sso sp signing-key rekey

This command will delete any existing signing key and certificate and replace them with a newly generated signing key and certificate. Make sure the newly generated certificate is added to the IDP to ensure that the IDP can verify messages sent from the cluster. Are you sure?  (yes/[no]):   yes
# isi auth sso sp signing-key dump
-----BEGIN CERIFICATE-----
MIIE6TCCAtGgAwIBAgIJAP30nSyYUz/cMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAMCYxJDAiBgNVBAMMG1Bvd2VyU2NhbGUgU0FNTCBTaWduaWSnIEtleTAeFw0yMjExMTUwMzU0NTFaFw0yMzExMTUwMzU0NTFaMCYxJDAiBgNVBAMMG1Bvd2VyU2NhbGUgU0FNTCBTaWduaWSnIEtleTCCAilwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQADggIPADCCAgoCggIBAMOOmYJ1aUuxvyH0nbUMurMbQubgtdpVBevy12D3qn+x7rgym8/v50da/4xpMmv/zbE0zJ0IVbWHZedibtQhLZ1qRSY/vBlaztU/nA90XQzXMnckzpcunOTG29SMO3x3Ud4*fqcP4sKhV
<snip>

When it is regenerated, either the XML file or certificate can be downloaded, and the cluster configuration updated by either metadata download or manual copy:

Finally, upload the SP details back to the identity provider.

For additional troubleshooting of OneFS SSO and authentication issues, there are some key log files to check. These include:

Author: Nick Trimbee

In the previous article in this series, we took a look at the new NFS locks and waiters reporting CLI command set and API endpoints. Next, we turn our attention to some additional context, caveats, and NFSv3 lock removal.

Before the NFS locking enhancements in OneFS 9.5, the legacy CLI commands were somewhat inefficient.  Their output also included other advisory domain locks such as SMB, which made the output more difficult to parse. The table below maps the new 9.5 CLI commands (and corresponding handlers) to the old NLM syntax.

Note that the isi_classic nfs locks and waiters CLI commands have also been deprecated in OneFS 9.5.

When upgrading to OneFS 9.5 or later from a prior release, the legacy platform API handlers continue to function through and post upgrade. Thus, any legacy scripts and automation are protected from this lock reporting deprecation. Additionally, while the new platform API handlers will work in during a rolling upgrade in mixed-mode, they will only return results for the nodes that have already been upgraded (‘high nodes’).

Be aware that the NFS locking CLI framework does not support partial responses. However, if a node is down or the cluster has a rolling upgrade in progress, the alternative is to query the equivalent platform API endpoint instead.

Performance-wise, on very large busy clusters, there is the possibility that the lock and waiter CLI commands’ output will be sluggish. In such instances, the --timeout flag can be used to increase the command timeout window. Output filtering can also be used to reduce number of locks reported.

When a lock is in a transition state, there is a chance that it may not have/report a version. In these instances, the Version field will be represented as —. For example:

# isi nfs locks list -v
Client: 1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250
Client ID: 487722351064074
LIN: 4295164422
Path: /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_1
Lock Type: exclusive
Range: 0, 92233772036854775807
Created: 2023-08-18T08:03:52
Version: -
---------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 1

This behavior should be experienced very infrequently. However, if it is encountered, simply execute the CLI command again, and the lock version should be reported correctly.

When it comes to troubleshooting NFSv3/NLM issues, if an NFSv3 client is consistently experiencing NLM_DENIED or other lock management issues, this is often a result of incorrectly configured firewall rules. For example, take the following packet capture (PCAP) excerpt from an NFSv4 Linux client:

   21 08:50:42.173300992  10.22.10.100 → 10.22.10.200 NLM 106    V4 LOCK Reply (Call In 19) NLM_DENIED

Often, the assumption is that only the lockd or statd ports on the server side of the firewall need to be opened and that the client always makes that connection that way. However, this is not the case. Instead, the server will continually respond with a ‘let me get back to you’, then later reconnect to the client. As such, if the firewall blocks access to rcpbind on the client and/or lockd or statd on the client, connection failures will likely occur.

Occasionally, it does become necessary to remove NLM locks and waiters from the cluster. Traditionally, the isi_classic nfs clients rm command was used, however that command has limitations and is fully deprecated in OneFS 9.5 and later. Instead, the preferred method is to use the isi nfs nlm sessions CLI utility in conjunction with various other ancillary OneFS CLI commands to clear problematic locks and waiters. 

Note that the isi nfs nlm sessions CLI command, available in all current OneFS version, is Zone-Aware. The output formatting is seen in the output for the client holding the lock as it now shows the Zone ID number at the beginning. For example:

 4/tme-linux1/10.22.10.250 

This represents:

Zone ID 4 / Client tme-linux1 / IP address of cluster node holding the connection.

A basic procedure to remove NLM locks and waiters from a cluster is as follows: 
 
1. List the NFS locks and search for the pertinent filename. 

In OneFS 8.5 and later, the locks list can be filtered using the --path argument.

# isi nfs locks list --path=<path> | grep <filename>

Be aware that the full path must be specified, starting with /ifs. There is no partial matching or substitution for paths in this command set.

For OneFS 9.4 and earlier, the following CLI syntax can be used:

#  isi_for_array -sX 'isi nfs nlm locks list | grep <filename>'

2. List the lock waiters associated with the same filename using |grep.

For OneFS 8.5 and later, the waiters list can also be filtered using the --path syntax:

# isi nfs locks waiters –path=<path> | grep <filename> 

With OneFS 9.4 and earlier, the following CLI syntax can be used:

# isi_for_array -sX 'isi nfs nlm locks waiters |grep -i <filename>'

3. Confirm the client and logical inode number (LIN) being waited upon. 

This can be accomplished by querying the efs.advlock.failover.lock_waiters sysctrl. For example:

# isi_for_array -sX 'sysctl efs.advlock.failover.lock_waiters'

[truncated output]
 ...
 client = { '4/tme-linux1/10.20.10.200’, 0x26593d37370041 }
 ...
resource = 2:df86:0218

Note that for sanity checking, the isi get -L CLI utility can be used to confirm the path of a file from its LIN:

isi get -L <LIN>

4. Remove the unwanted locks which are causing waiters to stack up. 

Keep in mind that the isi nfs nlm sessions command syntax is access zone-aware.

List the access zones by their IDs.

# isi zone zones list -v | grep -iE "Zone ID|name"

Once the desired zone ID has been determined, the isi_run -z CLI utility can be used to specify the appropriate zone in which to run the isi nfs nlm sessions commands: 

# isi_run -z 4 -l root

Next, the isi nfs nlm sessions delete CLI command will remove the specific lock waiter which is causing the issue. The command syntax requires specifying the client hostname and node IP of the node holding the lock. 

# isi nfs nlm sessions delete –-zone <AZ_zone_ID> <hostname> <cluster-ip>

For example:

# isi nfs nlm sessions delete –zone 4 tme-linux1 10.20.10.200
 Are you sure you want to delete all NFSv3 locks associated with client tme-linux1 against cluster IP 10.20.10.100? (yes/[no]): yes

5. Repeat the commands in step 1 to confirm that the desired NLM locks and waiters have been successfully culled.
 

BEFORE applying the process....

 # isi_for_array -sX 'isi nfs nlm locks list |grep JUN'
 TME-1: 4/tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_27JUN2017
 TME-1: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_28JUN2017
 TME-2: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_27JUN2017
 TME-2: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_28JUN2017
 TME-3: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_27JUN2017
 TME-3: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_28JUN2017
 TME-4: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_27JUN2017
 TME-4: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_28JUN2017
 TME-5: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_27JUN2017
 TME-5: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_28JUN2017
 TME-6: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_27JUN2017
 TME-6: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_28JUN2017
 
 
 # isi_for_array -sX 'isi nfs nlm locks waiters |grep -i JUN'
 TME-1: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_28JUN2017
 TME-1: 4/ tme-linux1/192.168.2.214  /ifs/tmp/TME/sequences/mncr_fabjob_seq_file_28JUN2017
 TME-2 exited with status 1
 TME-3 exited with status 1
 TME-4 exited with status 1
 TME-5 exited with status 1
 TME-6 exited with status 1

AFTER...

TME-1# isi nfs nlm sessions delete --hostname= tme-linux1 --cluster-ip=192.168.2.214
 Are you sure you want to delete all NFSv3 locks associated with client tme-linux1 against cluster IP 192.168.2.214? (yes/[no]): yes
 TME-1#
 TME-1#
 TME-1# isi_for_array -sX 'sysctl efs.advlock.failover.locks |grep 2:ce75:0319'
 TME-1 exited with status 1
 TME-2 exited with status 1
 TME-3 exited with status 1
 TME-4 exited with status 1
 TME-5 exited with status 1
 TME-6 exited with status 1
 TME-1#
 TME-1# isi_for_array -sX 'isi nfs nlm locks list |grep -i JUN'
 TME-1 exited with status 1
 TME-2 exited with status 1
 TME-3 exited with status 1
 TME-4 exited with status 1
 TME-5 exited with status 1
 TME-6 exited with status 1
 TME-1#
 TME-1# isi_for_array -sX 'isi nfs nlm locks waiters |grep -i JUN'
 TME-1 exited with status 1
 TME-2 exited with status 1
 TME-3 exited with status 1
 TME-4 exited with status 1
 TME-5 exited with status 1
 TME-6 exited with status 1

Author: Nick Trimbee

Included among the plethora of OneFS 9.5 enhancements is an updated NFS lock reporting infrastructure, command set, and corresponding platform API endpoints. This new functionality includes enhanced listing and filtering options for both locks and waiters, based on NFS major version, client, LIN, path, creation time, etc. But first, some backstory.

The ubiquitous NFS protocol underwent some fundamental architectural changes between its versions 3 and 4. One of the major differences concerns the area of file locking.

NFSv4 is the most current major version of the protocol, natively incorporating file locking and thereby avoiding the need for any additional (and convoluted) RPC callback mechanisms necessary with prior NFS versions. With NFSv4, locking is built into the main file protocol and supports new lock types, such as range locks, share reservations, and delegations/oplocks, which emulate those found in Window and SMB.

File lock state is maintained at the server under a lease-based model. A server defines a single lease period for all states held by an NFS client. If the client does not renew its lease within the defined period, all states associated with the client's lease may be released by the server. If released, the client may either explicitly renew its lease or simply issue a read request or other associated operation. Additionally, with NFSv4, a client can elect whether to lock the entire file or a byte range within a file. 

In contrast to NFSv4, the NFSv3 protocol is stateless and does not natively support file locking. Instead, the ancillary Network Lock Manager (NLM) protocol supplies the locking layer. Since file locking is inherently stateful, NLM itself is considered stateful. For example, when an NFSv3 filesystem mounted on an NFS client receives a request to lock a file, it generates an NLM remote procedure call instead of an NFS remote procedure call. 

The NLM protocol itself consists of remote procedure calls that emulate the standard UNIX file control (fcntl) arguments and outputs. Because a process blocks waiting for a lock that conflicts with another lock holder – also known as a ‘blocking lock’ – the NLM protocol has the notion of callbacks from the file server to the NLM client to notify that a lock is available. As such, the NLM client sometimes acts as an RPC server in order to receive delayed results from lock calls. 

Since NFSv3 is stateless, it requires more complexity to recover from failures like client and server outages and network partitions. If an NLM server crashes, NLM clients that are holding locks must reestablish them on the server when it restarts. The NLM protocol deals with this by having the status monitor on the server send a notification message to the status monitor of each NLM client that was holding locks. The initial period after a server restart is known as the grace period, during which only requests to reestablish locks are granted. Thus, clients that reestablish locks during the grace period are guaranteed to not lose their locks. 

When an NLM client crashes, ideally any locks it was holding at the time are removed from the pertinent NLM server(s). The NLM protocol handles this by having the status monitor on the client send a message to each server's status monitor once the client reboots. The client reboot indication informs the server that the client no longer requires its locks. However, if the client crashes and fails to reboot, the client's locks will persist indefinitely. This is undesirable for two primary reasons: Resources are indefinitely leaked. Eventually, another client will want to get a conflicting lock on at least one of the files the crashed client had locked and, as a result, the other client is postponed indefinitely.

Therefore, having NFS server utilities to swiftly and accurately report on lock and waiter status and utilities to clear NFS lock waiters is highly desirable for administrators – particularly on clustered storage architectures.

Prior to OneFS 9.5, the old NFS locking CLI commands were somewhat inefficient and also showed other advisory domain locks, which rendered the output somewhat confusing. The following table shows the new CLI commands (and corresponding handlers) which replace the older NLM syntax.

In OneFS 9.5 and later, the old API handlers will still exist to avoid breaking existing scripts and automation, however the CLI command syntax is deprecated and will no longer work.

Also be aware that the isi_classic nfs locks and waiters CLI commands have also been disabled in OneFS 9.5. Attempts to run these will yield the following warning message: 

# isi_classic nfs locks
This command has been disabled. Please use isi nfs for this functionality.

The new isi nfs locks CLI command output includes the following locks object fields:

Note that the ISI_NFS_PRIV RBAC privilege is required in order to view the NFS locks or waiters via the CLI or PAPI. In addition to ‘root’, the cluster’s ‘SystemAdmin’ and ‘SecurityAdmin’ roles contain this privilege by default.

Additionally, the new locks CLI command sets have a default timeout of 60 seconds. If the cluster is very large, the timeout may need to be increased for the CLI command. For example:

# isi –timeout <timeout value> nfs locks list

 The basic architecture of the enhanced NFS locks reporting framework is as follows:

The new API handlers leverage the platform API proxy, yielding increased performance over the legacy handlers. Additionally, updated syscalls have been implemented to facilitate filtering by NFS service and major version.

Since NFSv3 is stateless, the cluster does not know when a client has lost its state unless it reconnects. For maximum safety, the OneFS locking framework (lk) holds locks forever. The isi nfs nlm sessions CLI command allows administrators to manually free NFSv3 locks in such cases, and this command remains available in OneFS 9.5 as well as prior versions. NFSv3 locks may also be leaked on delete, since a valid inode is required for lock operations. As such, lkf has a lock reaper which periodically checks for locks associated with deleted files.

In OneFS 9.5 and later, current NFS locks can be viewed with the new isi nfs locks list command. This command set also provides a variety of options to limit and format the display output. In its basic form, this command generates a basic list of client IP address and the path. For example:

# isi nfs locks list
Client                              Path
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250       /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_1
1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250       /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_2
Linux NFSv4.0 TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250       /ifs/locks/nfsv4/10.22.10.250_1
Linux NFSv4.0 TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250       /ifs/locks/nfsv4/10.22.10.250_2
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 4

To include more information, the -v flag can be used to generate a verbose locks listing:

 # isi nfs locks list -v
Client: 1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250
Client ID: 487722351064074
LIN: 4295164422
Path: /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_1
Lock Type: exclusive
Range: 0, 92233772036854775807
Created: 2023-08-18T08:03:52
Version: v3
---------------------------------------------------------------
Client: 1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250
Client ID: 5175867327774721
LIN: 42950335042
Path: /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_1
Lock Type: exclusive
Range: 0, 92233772036854775807
Created: 2023-08-18T08:10:31
Version: v3
---------------------------------------------------------------
Client: Linux NFSv4.0 TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250
Client ID: 487722351064074
LIN: 429516442
Path: /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_1
Lock Type: exclusive
Range: 0, 92233772036854775807
Created: 2023-08-18T08:19:48
Version: v4
---------------------------------------------------------------
Client: Linux NFSv4.0 TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250
Client ID: 487722351064074
LIN: 4295426674
Path: /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_2
Lock Type: exclusive
Range: 0, 92233772036854775807
Created: 2023-08-18T08:17:02
Version: v4
---------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 4

The previous syntax returns more detailed information for each lock, including client ID, LIN, path, lock type, range, created date, and NFS version.

The lock listings can also be filtered by client or client-id. Note that the --client option must be the full name in quotes:

# isi nfs locks list --client="full_name_of_client/IP_address" -v

For example:

# isi nfs locks list --client="1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250" -v
Client: 1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250
Client ID: 5175867327774721
LIN: 42950335042
Path: /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_1
Lock Type: exclusive
Range: 0, 92233772036854775807
Created: 2023-08-18T08:10:31
Version: v3

Additionally, be aware that the CLI does not support partial names, so the full name of the client must be specified.

Filtering by NFS version can be helpful when attempting to narrow down which client has a lock. For example, to show just the NFSv3 locks:

# isi nfs locks list --version=v3 
Client                              Path
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250       /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_1
1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250       /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_2
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 2

Note that the –-version flag supports both v3 and nlm as arguments and will return the same v3 output in either case. For example:

# isi nfs locks list --version=nlm
Client                              Path
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250       /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_1
1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250       /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_2
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 2

Filtering by LIN or path is also supported. For example, to filter by LIN:

# isi nfs locks list --lin=42950335042 -v
Client: 1/TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250
Client ID: 5175867327774721
LIN: 42950335042
Path: /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_1
Lock Type: exclusive
Range: 0, 92233772036854775807
Created: 2023-08-18T08:10:31
Version: v3

Or by path:

# isi nfs locks list --path=/ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_2
 -v
Client: Linux NFSv4.0 TMECLI1:487722/10.22.10.250
Client ID: 487722351064074
LIN: 4295426674
Path: /ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_2
Lock Type: exclusive
Range: 0, 92233772036854775807
Created: 2023-08-18T08:17:02
Version: v4

Be aware that the full path must be specified, starting with /ifs. There is no partial matching or substitution for paths in this command set.

Filtering can also be performed by creation time, for example:

# isi nfs locks list --created=2023-08-17T09:30:00 -v 

Note that when filtering by created, the output will include all locks that were created before or at the time provided.

The —limits argument can be used to curtail the number of results returned, and limits can be used in conjunction with all other query options. For example, to limit the output of the NFSv4 locks listing to one lock:

# isi nfs locks list -–version=v4 --limit=1 

Note that limit can be used with the range of query types.

The filter options are mutually exclusive with the exception of version. Note that version can be used with any of the other filter options. For example, filtering by both created and version.

This can be helpful when troubleshooting and trying to narrow down results.

In addition to locks, OneFS 9.5 also provides the isi nfs locks waiters CLI command set. Note that waiters are specific to NFSv3 clients, and the CLI reports any v3 locks that are pending and not yet granted.

Since NFSv3 is stateless, a cluster does not know when a client has lost its state unless it reconnects. For maximum safety, lk holds locks forever. The isi nfs nlm command allows administrators to manually free locks in such cases. Locks may also be leaked on delete, since a valid inode is required for lock operations. Thus, lkf has a lock reaper which periodically checks for locks associated with deleted files:

# isi nfs locks waiters

The waiters CLI syntax uses a similar range of query arguments as the isi nfs locks list command set.

In addition to the CLI, the platform API can also be used to query both NFS locks and NFSv3 waiters. For example, using curl to view the waiters via the OneFS pAPI:

# curl -k -u <username>:<passwd> https://localhost:8080/platform/protocols/nfs/waiters”
{
“total” : 2,
“waiters”;
}
{
“client” : “1/TMECLI1487722/10.22.10.250”,
“client_id” : “4894369235106074”,
“created” : “1668146840”,
“id” : “1 1YUIAEIHVDGghSCHGRFHTiytr3u243567klj212-MANJKJHTTy1u23434yui-ouih23ui4yusdftyuySTDGJSDHVHGDRFhgfu234447g4bZHXhiuhsdm”,
“lin” : “4295164422”,
“lock_type” : “exclusive”
“path” : “/ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_1”
“range” : [0, 92233772036854775807 ],
“version” : “v3”
}
},
“total” : 1
}

Similarly, using the platform API to show locks filtered by client ID:

# curl -k -u <username>:<passwd> “https://<address>:8080/platform/protocols/nfs/locks?client=<client_ID>”

For example:

# curl -k -u <username>:<passwd> “https://localhost:8080/platform/protocols/nfs/locks?client=1/TMECLI1487722/10.22.10.250”
{
“locks”;
}
{
“client” : “1/TMECLI1487722/10.22.10.250”,
“client_id” : “487722351064074”,
“created” : “1668146840”,
“id” : “1 1YUIAEIHVDGghSCHGRFHTiytr3u243567FCUJHBKD34NMDagNLKYGHKHGKjhklj212-MANJKJHTTy1u23434yui-ouih23ui4yusdftyuySTDGJSDHVHGDRFhgfu234447g4bZHXhiuhsdm”,
“lin” : “4295164422”,
“lock_type” : “exclusive”
“path” : “/ifs/locks/nfsv3/10.22.10.250_1”
“range” : [0, 92233772036854775807 ],
“version” : “v3”
}
},
“Total” : 1
}

Note that, as with the CLI, the platform API does not support partial name matches, so the full name of the client must be specified.

Author: Nick Trimbee

In the initial article in this series, we took a look at the OneFS SSL architecture, plus the first two steps in the basic certificate renewal or creation flow detailed below:

The following procedure includes options to complete a self-signed certificate replacement or renewal or to request an SSL replacement or renewal from a Certificate Authority (CA).

Signing the SSL Certificate

At this point, depending on the security requirements of the environment, the certificate can either be self-signed or signed by a Certificate Authority.

Self-Sign the SSL Certificate 

The following CLI syntax can be used to self-sign the certificate with the key, creating a new signed certificate which, in this instance, is valid for 1 year (365 days):     

# openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt

To verify that the key matches the certificate, ensure that the output of the following CLI commands return the same md5 checksum value:    

# openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in server.crt | openssl md5           

# openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in server.key | openssl md5

Next, proceed to the Add certificate to cluster section of this article once this step is complete. 

Use a CA to Sign the Certificate

If a CA is signing the certificate, ensure that the new SSL certificate is in x509 format and includes the entire certificate trust chain.

Note that the CA may return the new SSL certificate, the intermediate cert, and the root cert in different files. If this is the case, the PEM formatted certificate will need to be created manually.

Notably, the correct ordering is important when creating the PEM-formatted certificate. The SSL cert must be the top of the file, followed by the intermediate certificate, with the root certificate at the bottom. For example:        

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----

<Contents of new SSL certificate>

-----END CERTIFICATE-----

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----

<Contents of intermediate certificate>

<Repeat as necessary for every intermediate certificate provided by your CA>

-----END CERTIFICATE-----

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----

<Contents of root certificate file>

-----END CERTIFICATE-----

A simple method for creating the PEM formatted file from the CLI is to cat them in the correct order as follows:

# cat CA_signed.crt intermediate.crt root.crt > onefs_pem_formatted.crt

Copy the onefs_pem_formatted.crt file to /ifs/tmp and rename it to server.crt. 

Note that if any of the aforementioned files are generated with a .cer extension, they should be renamed with a .crt extension instead.

The attributes and integrity of the certificate can be sanity checked with the following CLI syntax:       

# openssl x509 -text -noout -in server.crt

Adding the certificate to the cluster    

The first step in adding the certificate involves importing the new certificate and key into the cluster:      

# isi certificate server import /ifs/tmp/server.crt /ifs/tmp/server.key

Next, verify that the certificate imported successfully:     

# isi certificate server list -v 

The following CLI command can be used to show the names and corresponding IDs of the certificates:

# isi certificate server list -v | grep -A1 "ID:"

Set the imported certificate as default:      

# isi certificate settings modify --default-https-certificate=<id_of_cert_to_set_as_default>

Confirm that the imported certificate is being used as default by verifying status of Default HTTPS Certificate:     

# isi certificate settings view

If there is an unused or outdated cert, it can be deleted with the following CLI syntax:      

# isi certificate server delete --id=<id_of_cert_to_delete>

Next, view the new imported cert with command:      

# isi certificate server view --id=<id_of_cert>

Note that ports 8081 and 8083 still use the certificate from the local directory for SSL. Follow the steps below if you want to use the new certificates for port 8081/8083:

# isi services -a isi_webui disable
# chmod 640 server.key
# chmod 640 server.crt
# isi_for_array -s 'cp /ifs/tmp/server.key /usr/local/apache2/conf/ssl.key/server.key'
# isi_for_array -s 'cp /ifs/tmp/server.crt /usr/local/apache2/conf/ssl.crt/server.crt'
isi services -a isi_webui enable

Verifying the SSL certificate

There are two methods for verifying the updated SSL certificate.:

• Via the CLI, using the openssl command as follows:

# echo QUIT | openssl s_client -connect localhost:8080

• Or via a web browser, using the following URL:

https://<cluster_name>:8080

Note that where <cluster_name> is the FQDN or IP address, that’s typically used to access the cluster’s WebUI interface. The security details for the web page will contain the location and contact info, as above.

In both cases, the output includes location and contact info. For example:      

Subject: C=US, ST=<yourstate>, L=<yourcity>, O=<yourcompany>, CN=isilon.example.com/emailAddress=tme@isilon.com

Additionally, OneFS provides warning of an impending certificate expiry by sending a CELOG event alert, similar to the following:

SW_CERTIFICATE_EXPIRING: X.509 certificate default is nearing expiration: 
 
Event: 400170001
Certificate 'default' in '**' store is nearing expiration: 

Note that OneFS does not attempt to automatically renew a certificate. Instead, an expiring cert has to be renewed manually, per the procedure described above.

When adding an additional certificate, the matching cert is used any time you connect to that SmartConnect name via HTTPS. If no matching certificate is found, OneFS will automatically revert to using the default self-signed certificate.

Author: Nick Trimbee 

When using either the OneFS WebUI or platform API (pAPI), all communication sessions are encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), also known as Transport Layer Security (TLS). In this series, we will look at how to replace or renew the SSL certificate for the OneFS WebUI.

SSL requires a certificate that serves two principal functions: It grants permission to use encrypted communication using Public Key Infrastructure and authenticates the identity of the certificate’s holder.

Architecturally, SSL consists of four fundamental components:

These sit in the stack as follows:

The basic handshake process begins with a client requesting an HTTPS WebUI session to the cluster. OneFS then returns the SSL certificate and public key. The client creates a session key, encrypted with the public key it is received from OneFS. At this point, the client only knows the session key. The client now sends its encrypted session key to the cluster, which decrypts it with the private key. Now, both the client and OneFS know the session key. So, finally, the session, encrypted using a symmetric session key, can be established. OneFS automatically defaults to the best supported version of SSL, based on the client request.

A PowerScale cluster initially contains a self-signed certificate, which can be used as-is or replaced with a third-party certificate authority (CA)-issued certificate. If the self-signed certificate is used upon expiry, it must be replaced with either a third-party (public or private) CA-issued certificate or another self-signed certificate that is generated on the cluster. The following are the default locations for the server.crt and server.key files.

The ‘isi certificate settings view’ CLI command displays all of the certificate-related configuration options. For example:

The above ‘certificate monitor enabled’ and ‘certificate pre expiration threshold’ configuration options govern a nightly cron job, which monitors the expiration of each managed certificate and fires a CELOG alert if a certificate is set to expire within the configured threshold. Note that the default expiration is 30 days (4W2D, which represents 4 weeks plus 2 days). The ‘ID: default’ configuration option indicates that this certificate is the default TLS certificate.

The basic certificate renewal or creation flow is as follows:

The steps below include options to complete a self-signed certificate replacement or renewal, or to request an SSL replacement or renewal from a Certificate Authority (CA).

Backing up the existing SSL certificate

The first task is to obtain the list of certificates by running the following CLI command, and identify the appropriate one to renew:

It’s always a prudent practice to save a backup of the original certificate and key. This can be easily accomplished using the following CLI commands, which, in this case, create the directory ‘/ifs/data/ssl_bkup’ directory, set the perms to root-only access, and copy the original key and certificate to it:

Renewing or creating a certificate

The next step in the process involves either the renewal of an existing certificate or creation of a certificate from scratch. In either case, first, create a temporary directory, for example /ifs/tmp:

a)       Renew an existing self-signed Certificate.

The following syntax creates a renewal certificate based on the existing ssl.key. The value of the ‘-days’ parameter can be adjusted to generate a certificate with the wanted expiration date. For example, the following command will create a one-year certificate.

Answer the system prompts to complete the self-signed SSL certificate generation process, entering the pertinent information location and contact information. For example:

Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:US
 State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:Washington
 Locality Name (eg, city) []:Seattle
 Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:Isilon
 Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:TME
 Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name) []:isilon.com
 Email Address []:tme@isilon.com

When all the information has been successfully entered, the server.csr and server.key files will be generated under the /ifs/tmp directory.

Optionally,  the attributes and integrity of the certificate can be verified with the following syntax:

Next, proceed directly to the ‘Add the certificate to the cluster’ steps in section 4 of this article.

b)      Alternatively, a certificate and key can be generated from scratch, if preferred.

The following CLI command can be used to create an 2048-bit RSA private key:

Next, create a certificate signing request:

For example: 

Answer the system prompts to complete the self-signed SSL certificate generation process, entering the pertinent information location and contact information. Additionally, a ‘challenge password’ with a minimum of 4-bytes in length will need to be selected and entered.

As prompted, enter the information to be incorporated into the certificate request. When completed, the server.csr and server.key files will appear in the /ifs/tmp directory.

If wanted, a CSR file for a Certificate Authority, which includes Subject-Alternative-Names (SAN) can be generated. For example, additional host name entries can be added using a comma (IE. DNS:isilon.com,DNS:www.isilon.com).

In the next article, we will look at the certificate singing, addition, and verification steps of the process.

As on-the-wire encryption becomes increasingly commonplace, and often mandated via regulatory compliance security requirements, the policies applied in enterprise networks are rapidly shifting towards fully encrypting all traffic.

The OneFS SMB protocol implementation (lwio) has supported encryption for Windows and other SMB client connections to a PowerScale cluster since OneFS 8.1.1.

However, prior to OneFS 9.5, this did not include encrypted communications between the SMB redirector and Active Directory (AD) domain controller (DC). While Microsoft added support for SMB encryption in SMB 3.0, the redirector in OneFS 9.4 and prior releases only supported Microsoft’s earlier SMB 2.002 dialect.

When OneFS connects to Active Directory for tasks requiring remote procedure calls (RPCs), such as joining a domain, NTLM authentication, or resolving usernames and SIDs, these SMB connections are established from OneFS as the client connecting to a domain controller server.

As outlined in the Windows SMB security documentation, by default, and starting with Windows 2012 R2, domain admins can choose to encrypt access to a file share, which can include a domain controller. When encryption is enabled, only SMB3 connections are permitted.

With OneFS 9.5, the OneFS SMB redirector now supports SMB3, thereby allowing the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) daemon to communicate with domain controllers running Windows Server 2012 R2 and later over an encrypted session.

The OneFS redirector, also known as the ‘rdr driver’, is a stripped-down SMB client with minimal functionality, only supporting what is absolutely necessary.

Under the hood, OneFS SMB encryption and decryption use standard OpenSSL functions, and AES-128-CCM encryption is negotiated during SMB negotiate phase.

Although everything stems from the NTLM authentication requested by SMB server, the sequence of calls leads to the redirector establishing an SMB connection to the AD domain controller.

With OneFS 9.5, no configuration is required to enable SMB encryption in most situations, and there are no WebUI OR CLI configuration settings for the redirector.

With the default OneFS configuration, the redirector supports encryption if negotiated but it does not require it. Similarly, if the Active Directory domain requires encryption, the OneFS redirector will automatically enable and use encryption. However, if the OneFS redirector is explicitly configured to require encryption and the domain controller does not support encryption, the connection will fail.

The OneFS redirector encryption settings include:

The above keys and values are stored in the OneFS Likewise SMB registry and can be viewed and configured with the ‘lwreqshell’ utility. For example, to view the SMB redirector encryption config settings:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwregshell list_values "HKEY_THIS_MACHINE\Services\lwio\Parameters\Drivers\rdr" | grep -i encrypt

    "Smb3EncryptionEnabled"   REG_DWORD       0x00000001 (1)

    "Smb3EncryptionRequired" REG_DWORD       0x00000000 (0)

The following syntax can be used to disable the ‘Smb3EncryptionRequired’ parameter by setting it to value ‘1’:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwregshell set_value "[HKEY_THIS_MACHINE\Services\lwio\Parameters\Drivers\rdr]" "Smb3EncryptionRequired" "0x00000001"

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwregshell list_values "HKEY_THIS_MACHINE\Services\lwio\Parameters\Drivers\rdr" | grep -i encrypt

    "Smb3EncryptionEnabled"   REG_DWORD       0x00000001 (1)

   "Smb3EncryptionRequired" REG_DWORD       0x00000001 (1)

Similarly, to restore the ‘Smb3EncryptionRequired’ parameter’s default value of ‘0’ (ie. not required):

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwregshell set_value "[HKEY_THIS_MACHINE\Services\lwio\Parameters\Drivers\rdr]" "Smb3EncryptionEnabled" "0x00000001"

Note that, during the upgrade to OneFS 9.5, any nodes still running the old version will not be able to NTLM-authenticate if the DC they have affinity with requires encryption.

While redirector encryption is implemented in user space (in contrast to the SMB server, which is in the kernel), since it involves OpenSSL, the library does take advantage of hardware acceleration on the processor and utilizes AES-NI. As such, performance is only minimally impacted when the number of NTLM authentications to the AD domain is very large.

Also note that redirector encryption also only currently supports only AES-128-CCM encryption provided in the SMB 3.0.0 and 3.0.2 dialects. OneFS does not use AES-128-GCM encryption, available in the SMB 3.1.1 dialect (the latest), at this time.

When it comes to troubleshooting the redirector, the lwregshell tool can be used to verify its configuration settings. For example, to view the redirector encryption settings:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwregshell list_values "HKEY_THIS_MACHINE\Services\lwio\Parameters\Drivers\rdr" | grep -i encrypt

    "Smb3EncryptionEnabled"   REG_DWORD       0x00000001 (1)

    "Smb3EncryptionRequired" REG_DWORD       0x00000000 (0)

Similarly, to find the maximum SMB version supported by the redirector:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwregshell list_values "HKEY_THIS_MACHINE\Services\lwio\Parameters\Drivers\rdr" | grep -i dialect

    "MaxSmb2DialectVersion"   REG_SZ          "max"

The ‘lwsm’ CLI utility with the following syntax will confirm the status of the various lsass components:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwsm list | grep lsass

lsass                       [service]     running (lsass: 5164)

netlogon                    [service]     running (lsass: 5164)

rdr                         [driver]      running (lsass: 5164)

It can also be used to show and modify the logging level. For example:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwsm get-log rdr

<default>: syslog LOG_CIFS at WARNING

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwsm set-log-level rdr - debug

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwsm get-log rdr

<default>: syslog LOG_CIFS at DEBUG

When finished, rdr logging can be returned to its previous log level as follows:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwsm set-log-level rdr - warning

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwsm get-log rdr

<default>: syslog LOG_CIFS at WARNING

Additionally, the existing ‘lwio-tool’ utility has been modified in OneFS 9.5 to include functionality allowing simple test connections to domain controllers (no NTLM) via the new ‘rdr’ syntax:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwio-tool rdr openpipe //<domain_controller>/NETLOGON

The ‘lwio-tool’ usage in OneFS 9.5 is as follows:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwio-tool -h

Usage: lwio-tool <command> [command-args]

   commands:

    iotest rundown

    rdr [openpipe|openfile] username@password://domain/path

    srvtest transport [query|start|stop]

    testfileapi [create|createnp] <path>

Author: Nick Trimbee

There has been a tremendous surge of information about artificial intelligence (AI), and generative AI (GenAI) has taken center stage as a key use case. Companies are looking to learn more about how to build architectures to successfully run AI infrastructures. In most cases, creating a GenAI solution involves fine-tuning a pretrained foundational model and deploying it as an inference service. Dell recently published a design guide – Generative AI in the Enterprise – Inferencing, that provides an outline of the overall process.

All AI projects should start with understanding the business objectives and key performance indicators. Planning, data prep, and training make up the other phases of the cycle. At the core of the development are the systems that drive these phases – servers, GPUs, storage, and networking infrastructures. Dell is well equipped to deliver everything an enterprise needs to build, develop, and maintain analytic models that serve business needs.

GPUs and accelerators have become common practice within AI infrastructures. They pull in data and training/fine-tune models within the computational capabilities of the GPU. As GPUs have evolved, their ability to handle larger models and parallel development cycles has evolved. This has left a lot of us wondering - how do we build an architecture that will support the model development that my business needs? It helps to understand a few parameters.

Defining business objectives and use cases will help shape your architecture requirements.

• The size and location of the training data set
• Model size in number of parameters and type of model being trained/fine-tuned
• Training parallelism and time to complete the training/fine-tuning.

Answering these questions helps determine how many GPUs are needed to train/fine-tune the model. Consider two main factors in GPU sizing. First is the amount of GPU memory needed to store model parameters and optimizer state. Second is the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) needed to execute the model. Both generally scale with model size. Large models often exceed the resources of a single GPU and require spreading a single model over multiple GPUs.

Estimating the number of GPUs needed to train/fine-tune the model helps determine the server technologies to choose. When sizing servers, it’s important to balance the right GPU density and interconnect, power consumption, PCI bus technology, external port capacity, memory, and CPU. Dell PowerEdge servers include a variety of options for GPU types and density. PowerEdge XE Servers can host up to 8 NVIDIA H100 GPUs in a single server GenAI on PowerEdge XE9680, as well as the latest technologies, including NVLink, NVIDIA GPUDirect, PCIe 5.0, and NVMe disks. PowerEdge mainstream servers range from two to four GPU configurations, offering a variety of GPUs from different manufacturers. PowerEdge servers provide outstanding performance for all phases of model development. Visit Dell.com for more on PowerEdge Servers.  

Now that we understand how many GPUs are needed and the servers to host them, it’s time to tackle storage. At a minimum, the storage should have capacity to host the training data set, the checkpoints during the model training, and any other data that relates to the pruning/preparing phase. The storage also needs to deliver the data at a rate the GPUs request it. The rate of delivery is multiplied by model parallelism, or the number of models being trained in parallel, and subsequently the number of GPUs requesting the data simultaneously (concurrently). Ideally, every GPU is running at 90% or better to maximize our investment, and a storage system that supports high concurrency is suited for these types of workloads.

Tools such as FIO or its cousin GDSIO (used to understand speeds and feeds of the storage system) are great for gaining hero numbers or theoretical maximums for reads/writes, but they are not representative of performance requirements for the AI development cycles. Data prep and stage shows up on the storage as random R/W, while during the training/fine-tuning phase, the GPUs are concurrently streaming reads from the storage system. Checkpoints throughout training are handled as writes back to the storage. These different points during the AI lifecycle require storage that can successfully handle these workloads at the scale determined by our model calculations and parallel development cycles.

Data scientists at Dell take great effort in understanding how different model development affects server and storage requirements. For example, language models like BERT and GPT have little effect on storage performance and resources, whereas image sequencing and DLRM models have significant or show worst case storage performance and resource demand. For this, the Dell storage teams focus testing and benchmarking on AI Deep Learning workflows based on popular image models like ResNet with real GPUs to understand the performance requirements needed to deliver data to the GPU during model training. The following image shows an architecture designed with Dell PowerEdge servers and networking with PowerScale scale-out storage.

Dell PowerScale scale-out file storage is especially suited for these workloads.  Each node in a PowerScale cluster delivers equivalent performance as the cluster and workloads scale. The following images show how PowerScale performance scales linearly as GPUs are increased, while the performance of each individual GPU remains constant. The scale-out architecture of PowerScale file storage easily supports AI workflows from small to large.

Figure 1.  PowerScale linear performance 

Figure 2.  Consistent GPU performance with scale

The predictability of PowerScale allows us to estimate the storage resources needed for model training and fine-tuning. We can easily scale these architectures based on the model type and size along with the number and type of GPUs required.

Architecting for small and large AI workloads is challenging and takes planning. Understanding performance needs and how the components in the architecture will perform as the AI workload demand scales is critical.

Author: Darren Miller

Now in its 9th generation, Emmy-award-winning Dell PowerScale storage has been field proven in media workflows for over two decades and is the world’s most flexible¹, efficient², and secure³ scale-out NAS solution.  

Our partnership with Marvel Studios is a wonderful example of the innovations we collaborate on with leading media and entertainment companies around the world—with PowerScale as the preeminent storage solution that enables data-driven workflows to accelerate content-creation pipelines. 

Hear about Marvel Studios’ implementation of PowerScale directly in this educational video series from The Advanced Imaging Society: 

The PowerScale OneFS advantage

The underlying OneFS file system leverages the foundations of clustered high-performance computing to solve the challenges of data protection at scale and client accessibility in a massively parallelized way. In practice, a single namespace that easily scales out with nodes to increase performance and capacity is a fundamentally game-changing architecture. 

Media workflows require increased levels of access for the applications and users to provide for workflow collaboration in balance with security that doesn’t impede performance. Further, performance and access can’t be impeded even during hardware failures such as drive rebuilds or system upgrades to ensure that production work can continue uninterrupted while maintenance is being performed in the background.  

Maximizing uptime correlates with fundamental business needs including meeting project timelines and budgets while ensuring that personnel have access to the content at the required performance levels, even during a background maintenance activity. 

As a sufficiently advanced enterprise-class solution, PowerScale incorporates these capabilities to eliminate complexity and provide for increased uptime through its self-healing and self-managing functionality. (For more information, see the PowerScale OneFS Technical Overview.) This takes many of the traditional storage management burdens off the administrator’s plate, lowering the overhead and time needed to maintain storage, which is often increasing in size and scale.

While the benefits of collaboration over Ethernet-based storage are inherent in PowerScale, the user experience is also paramount in correlation with the performance of the network and underlying storage system. Operations such as playout and scrubbing need to perform reliably with no frame drops while providing response times that look and feel equivalent to working from the local workstation. 

As I’ve participated in the development of media storage solutions from SCSI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, SAN, and Ethernet, I’ve been able to test and compare solutions over the years and have closely watched the evolution and trends of these protocols in relation to their ability to support media workflows. 

In 2007, I demonstrated real-time color grading with uncompressed content over 1 Gb Ethernet, the first of its kind. At the time, using Ethernet-based storage for color grading was largely unheard of, with few applications supporting it. That was more of an exercise to showcase the art of the possible in comparison with Fibre Channel-based solutions. The wider adoption of Ethernet for this particular use case was not yet of high interest because Ethernet speeds still needed to evolve. However, 1 Gb Ethernet was very appropriate for compressed media workflows and rendering, which were well aligned with the high-performance, scale-out design of PowerScale. 

As 10 Gb Ethernet speeds became prevalent, there was a significant uptick in the adoption of Ethernet-based storage compared to Fibre Channel-based solutions for media use cases. I also started to see more datasets being moved over Ethernet rather than by sneaker net, physically delivering drives and tapes between locations. This led to cost and time savings for project timelines and budgets, among other benefits. 

Fast-forward to 2014, when, with the OneFS 7.1.1 version supporting SMB multi-channel, we were able to use two 10 Gb Ethernet connections to support a stream of full resolution uncompressed 4K, whereas a single 10 Gb connection was only capable of supporting 2K full resolution streams. This began an adoption trend of Ethernet solutions for 4K full-resolution workflows. 

In 2017, with the release of the F800 All-Flash PowerScale and OneFS 8.1, 40 Gb Ethernet speeds were supported. The floodgates were unlocked for media workflows. Multiple full-resolution 2K and 4K workflows could run on a single shared OneFS namespace with uncompromised performance. Workload consolidation could be performed and started to eliminate the need for multiple discreet storage solutions that were each supporting different parts of the pipeline, bringing all those together under a single unified OneFS namespace to streamline environments.  

Complete pipeline transformations were taking place and began to replace iSCSI and Fibre Channel-based solutions at an accelerated pace, as those solutions were siloed within workgroups and inflexible with the emerging needs of collaboration. When the PowerScale F900 NVMe solution supporting 100 Gb Ethernet came out in 2021, the technology was set to change the industry yet again.  

With the increasing prevalence of 100 Gb Ethernet over these past few years, performance parity with Fibre Channel-based solutions to support full-resolution 4K, 8K, and all related media workflows in between is no longer in question. Native Ethernet-based solutions are preferred for many reasons—including cloud capability, scale, cost, and supportability—to facilitate unstructured media datasets, leveraging the abundance of network engineering talent in comparison to Fibre Channel-trained engineers.  

With reliability, performance, and shared access for collaboration delivering uncompromised benefits, we now look to several PowerScale storage capabilities that enable rich media ecosystems to be further streamlined and flourish. 

There are four additional key areas of focus and their underlying feature sets that are increasingly important to today’s media ecosystems. They encompass: 

• Security, physical and logical 
• API orchestration 
• Data movement 
• Quality of service 

Security

• In relation to PowerScale being the world’s most secure scale-out NAS solution and in alignment with the Trusted Partner Network (TPN), the OneFS operating system meets or exceeds the Motion Picture Association (MPA) Content Security Best Practices (CSBP) in all relevant areas of the Content Security Model (CSM).⁴
  
  
• Further, I’m seeing greater adoption of self-encrypting drives (SEDs), which provide encryption at the physical layer. Security auditing and multi-factor authentication are among the features being employed to protect the logical layer. Specifically, auditing has been available and used for many years now to provide a range of benefits beyond security.  
  
  
• The real-time audit logs can be parsed to provide performance introspection, analysis, and user-trend insights in addition to identifying abnormal data-access patterns. The logs can also be used to correlate with levels of access to specific projects and files, correlating back to business-level insights and reports as well. 
  
  
• I’m also keen on mentioning the OneFS embedded firewall, which provides connection-level protection at the storage network layer. Firewalls are typically employed in front of the storage or further upstream on the network, so having an additional firewall within the storage that protects the network ports on the storage itself is a powerful layer of security. 

For more information about OneFS security, see Dell PowerScale OneFS: Security Considerations.

Data orchestration

• Data orchestration is paramount to workflow automation. If aspects of workflows can be automated and don’t require an operator to make a decision, they should be automated to remove the possibility for operator error and streamline the environment to accelerate workflows where possible. 
  
  
• Orchestration is enabled through API calls to integrate PowerScale with the environment’s application layers, which can take mundane repeatable tasks off the operator’s plate and increase workflow efficiency. 

For more information about PowerScale data orchestration, see the OneFS documentation on Dell Support.

Data movement

• Data movement is integral to media workflows today, and for that we look to the high-performance, highly reliable SyncIQ protocol embedded in PowerScale OneFS. SyncIQ facilitates secure, parallelized transfer of datasets between PowerScale solutions, providing strong benefits for media workflows. Replication policies can be set up or initiated ad hoc to transfer datasets between PowerScale solutions over the network.  
  
  
• With SyncIQ, PowerScale is both a storage platform and a data transfer engine, so additional servers and transfer applications, which would incur additional cost and management overhead, don’t need to be implemented in front of PowerScale.

The PowerScale Backup and Recovery Guide provides more information about data movement capabilities in OneFS.

Quality of service

• Quality of service is increasingly important and has always been of interest for media workflows. SmartQoS is an embedded OneFS feature that monitors front-end protocol traffic over NFS, SMB, and S3. It allows limits to be set for the number of protocol operations to tie them back to performance SLAs, prioritization of workloads, and support for throttling to prevent specific clients from saturating a connection. I’ve seen an unthrottled copy job use the available connection bandwidth and interrupt a playout, so that’s an example of a use case where SmartQoS can be applied. 
  
  
• Clients can be logically grouped and monitored with all kinds of metrics being captured to quantify and profile workloads. Introspection into read and write latencies, IOPS, and many other metrics on a per-protocol, path, IP address, user, and group basis can be captured and correlated in real time. Metrics can be tracked and enforced to provide quality of service for specific classes of users and workflows, which can all be defined to manage workloads. 

For more information about quality of service in OneFS, see this blog post: OneFS SmartQoS.

Summary

The capabilities of PowerScale storage with OneFS are delivering unparalleled scale and feature benefits that elevate the capabilities of media entertainment use cases from the highest performance workflows to highly dense archives. Standardization on this enterprise-class, secure, and collaborative platform is the key to unlocking innovation and advancing your media pipelines. 

¹ Based on internal analysis of publicly available information sources, February 2023. CLM-0013892.

² Based on Dell analysis comparing efficiency-related features: data reduction, storage capacity, data protection, hardware, space, lifecycle management efficiency, and ENERGY STAR certified configurations, June 2023. CLM-008608.

³ Based on Dell analysis comparing cyber-security software capabilities offered for Dell PowerScale vs. competitive products, September 2022.

⁴ Dell Technologies Executive Summary of Compliance with Media Industry Security Guidelines, https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-ae/products/storage/briefs-summaries/tpn-executive-summary-compliance-statement.pdf.

Author: Brian Cipponeri, Global Solutions Architect 
Dell Technologies – Unstructured Data Solutions 

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts to reveal some helpful tips and tricks when supporting media production workflows on PowerScale OneFS.

OneFS has an incredible user-drivable toolset underneath the hood that can grant you access to data so valuable to your workflow that you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

When working on productions in the past I’ve witnessed and had to troubleshoot many issues that arise in different parts of the pipeline. Often these are in the render part of the pipeline, which is what I’m going to focus on in this blog.

Render pipelines are normally fairly straightforward in their make-up, but they require everything to be just right to ensure that you don’t starve a cluster of resource, which, if your cluster is at the center of all of your production operations can cause a whole studio outage, causing impact to your creatives, revenue loss, and unnecessary delays in production.

Did you know that any command that is run on a OneFS cluster is an API call down to the OneFS API. This can be observed if you add the --debug flag to any command that you run on the CLI. As shown here, this displays the call information that was sent to gather the information requested, which is helpful if you're integrating your own administration tools into your pipeline.

# isi --debug statistics client list
        2023-06-22 10:24:41,086 DEBUG rest.py:80: >>>GET ['3', 'statistics', 'summary', 'client']
        2023-06-22 10:24:41,086 DEBUG rest.py:81:    args={'sort': 'operation_rate,in,out,time_avg,node,protocol,class,user.name,local_name,remote_name', 'degraded': 'False', 'timeout': '15'}
        body={}
        2023-06-22 10:24:41,212 DEBUG rest.py:106: <<<(200, {'content-type': 'application/json', 'allow': 'GET, HEAD', 'status': '200 Ok'}, b'n{\n"client" : [  ]\n}\n')

There are so many potential applications for OneFS API calls, from monitoring statistics on the cluster to using your own tools for creating shares, and so on. (We'll go deeper into the API in a future post!)

When we are facing production-stopping activities on a cluster, they're often caused by a rogue process outside the OneFS environment that is as yet unknown to us, which means we have to figure out what that process is and what it is doing.

In walks isi statistics.

By using the isi statistics command, we can very quickly see what is happening on a cluster at any given time. It can give us live reports on which user or connection is causing an issue, how much I/O they're generating as well as what their IP is, what protocol they’re connected using, and so on.

If the cluster is experiencing a sudden slowdown (during a render, for example), we can run a couple of simple statistics commands to show us what the cluster is doing and who's hitting it the hardest. Some examples of these commands are as follows:

isi statistics system --n=all --format=top

Displays all nodes’ real-time statistics in a *NIX “top” style format:

# isi statistics system --n=all --format=top
Node   CPU SMB FTP HTTP NFS HDFS  S3 Total NetIn NetOut DiskIn DiskOut
 All 33.7% 0.0 0.0  0.0 0.0   0.0 0.0   0.0 401.6  215.6     0.0     0.0
   1 33.7% 0.0 0.0  0.0 0.0   0.0 0.0   0.0 401.6  215.6     0.0     0.0

isi statistics client list --totalby=UserName --sort=Ops

This command displays all clients connected and shows their stats, including the UserName they are connected with. It places the users with the highest number of total Ops at the top so that you can track down the user or account that is hitting the storage the hardest.

# isi statistics client --totalby=UserName --sort=Ops
 Ops     In  Out  TimeAvg   Node  Proto  Class   UserName  LocalName  RemoteName
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
12.8 12.6M 1.1k  95495.8     *       *      *      root          *           *
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

isi statistics client --UserName=<username> --sort=Ops

This command goes a bit further and breaks down ALL of the Ops by type being requested by that user. If you know the protocol that the user you’re investigating is using we can also add the operator “--proto=<nfs/smb>” to the command too.

# isi statistics client --user-names=root --sort=Ops
 Ops     In   Out  TimeAvg   Node  Proto           Class  UserName        LocalName    RemoteName
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 5.8   6.1M 487.2 142450.6     1   smb2           write      root 192.168.134.101 192.168.134.1
 2.8 259.2 332.8    497.2      1   smb2      file_state      root 192.168.134.101 192.168.134.1
 2.6 985.6 549.8  10255.1      1   smb2          create      root 192.168.134.101 192.168.134.1
 2.6 275.0 570.6   3357.5      1   smb2  namespace_read      root 192.168.134.101 192.168.134.1
 0.4   85.6  28.0   3911.5      1   smb2 namespace_write      root 192.168.134.101 192.168.134.1
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The other useful command, particularly when troubleshooting ad hoc performance issues, is isi statistics heat.

isi statistics heat list --totalby=path --sort=Ops | head -12

This command shows the top 10 file paths that are being hit by the largest number of I/O operations.

# isi statistics heat list --totalby=path --sort=Ops | head -12
  Ops   Node  Event  Class Path
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
141.7     *       *      * /ifs/
127.8     *       *      * /ifs/.ifsvar
 86.3      *      *      * /ifs/.ifsvar/modules
 81.7      *      *      * SYSTEM (0x0)
 33.3      *      *      * /ifs/.ifsvar/modules/tardis
 28.6      *      *      * /ifs/.ifsvar/modules/tardis/gconfig
 28.3      *      *      * /ifs/.ifsvar/upgrade
 13.1      *      *      * /ifs/.ifsvar/upgrade/logs/UpgradeLog-1.db
 11.9      *      *      * /ifs/.ifsvar/modules/tardis/namespaces/healthcheck_schedules.sqlite
 10.5      *      *      * /ifs/.ifsvar/modules/cloud

Once you have all this information, you can now find the user or process (based on IP, UserName, and so on) and figure out what that user is doing and what's causing the render to fail or high I/O generation. In many situations, it will be an asset that is either sitting on a lower-performance tier of the cluster or, if you're using a front side render cache, an asset that is sitting outside of the pre-cached path, so the spindles in the cluster are taking the I/O hit.

For more tips and tricks that can help to save you valuable time, keep checking back. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch and I'll do my best to help!

Author: Andy Copeland
Media & Entertainment Solutions Architect

The OneFS key manager is a backend service that orchestrates the storage of sensitive information for PowerScale clusters. To satisfy Dell’s Secure Infrastructure Ready requirements and other public and private sector security mandates, the manager provides the ability to replace, or rekey, cryptographic keys.

The quintessential consumer of OneFS key management is data-at-rest encryption (DARE). Protecting sensitive data stored on the cluster with cryptography ensures that it’s guarded against theft, in the event that drives or nodes are removed from a PowerScale cluster. DARE is a requirement for federal and industry regulations, ensuring data is encrypted when it is stored. OneFS has provided DARE solutions for many years through secure encrypted drives (SEDs) and the OneFS key management system.

A 256-bit key (MK) encrypts the Key Manager Database (KMDB) for SED and cluster domains. In OneFS 9.2 and later, the MK for SEDs can either be stored off-cluster on a KMIP server or locally on a node (the legacy behavior).

However, there are a variety of other consumers of the OneFS key manager, in addition to DARE. These include services and protocols such as:

 OneFS 9.5 introduces a number of enhancements to the venerable key manager, including:

• The ability to rekey keystores. Rekey operation will generate a new MK and re-encrypt all entries stored with the new key.
• New CLI commands and WebUI options to perform a rekey operation or schedule key rotation on a time interval.
• New commands to monitor the progress and status of a rekey operation.

As such, OneFS 9.5 now provides the ability to rekey the MK, irrespective of where it is stored.

Note that when you are upgrading from an earlier OneFS release, the new rekey functionality is only available once the OneFS 9.5 upgrade has been committed.

Under the hood, each provider store in the key manager consists of secure backend storage and an MK. Entries are kept in a SQLite database or key-value store. A provider datastore uses its MK to encrypt all its entries within the store.

During the rekey process, the old MK is only deleted after a successful re-encryption with the new MK. If for any reason the process fails, the old MK is available and remains as the current MK. The rekey daemon retries the rekey every 15 minutes if the process fails.

The OneFS rekey process is as follows:

1. A new MK is generated, and internal configuration is updated.
2. Any entries in the provider store are decrypted and encrypted with the new MK.
3. If the prior steps are successful, the previous MK is deleted.

To support the rekey process, the MK in OneFS 9.5 now has an ID associated with it. All entries have a new field referencing the MK ID.

During the rekey operation, there are two MK values with different IDs, and all entries in the database will associate which key they are encrypted by.

In OneFS 9.5, the rekey configuration and management is split between the cluster keys and the SED keys:

SED keys rekey

The SED key manager rekey operation can be managed through a DARE cluster’s CLI or WebUI, and it can either be automatically scheduled or run manually on demand. The following CLI syntax can be used to manually initiate a rekey:

# isi keymanager sed rekey start

Alternatively, to schedule a rekey operation, for example, to schedule a key rotation every two months:

# isi keymanager sed rekey modify --key-rotation=2m

The key manager status for SEDs can be viewed as follows:

# isi keymanager sed status
 Node Status  Location   Remote Key ID  Key Creation Date   Error Info(if any)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1   LOCAL   Local                    1970-01-01T00:00:00
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 1

Alternatively, from the WebUI, go to Access > Key Management >  SED/Cluster Rekey, select Automatic rekey for SED keys, and configure the rekey frequency:

Note that for SED rekey operations, if a migration from local cluster key management to a KMIP server is in progress, the rekey process will begin once the migration is complete.

Cluster keys rekey

As mentioned previously, OneFS 9.5 also supports the rekey of cluster keystore domains. This cluster rekey operation is available through the CLI and the WebUI and may either be scheduled or run on demand. The available cluster domains can be queried by running the following CLI syntax:

# isi keymanager cluster status
Domain     Status  Key Creation Date   Error Info(if any)
----------------------------------------------------------
CELOG      ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
CERTSTORE  ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
CLOUDPOOLS ACTIVE   2023-04-06T09:19:16
EMAIL      ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
FTP        ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
IPMI_MGMT  IN_PROGRESS  2023-04-06T09:19:16
JWT        ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
LHOTSE     ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:11
NDMP       ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
NETWORK    ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
PSTORE     ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
RICE       ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
S3         ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
SIQ        ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
SNMP       ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
SRS        ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
SSO        ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
----------------------------------------------------------
Total: 17

The rekey process generates a new key and re-encrypts the entries for the domain. The old key is then deleted.

Performance-wise, the rekey process does consume cluster resources (CPU and disk) as a result of the re-encryption phase, which is fairly write-intensive. As such, a good practice is to perform rekey operations outside of core business hours or during scheduled cluster maintenance windows.

During the rekey process, the old MK is only deleted once a successful re-encryption with the new MK has been confirmed. In the event of a rekey process failure, the old MK is available and remains as the current MK.

A rekey may be requested immediately or may be scheduled with a cadence. The rekey operation is available through the CLI and the WebUI. In the WebUI, go to Access > Key Management > SED/Cluster Rekey.

To start a rekey of the cluster domains immediately, from the CLI run the following syntax:

# isi keymanager cluster rekey start 
Are you sure you want to rekey the master passphrase? (yes/[no]):yes

Alternatively, from the WebUI, go to Access under the SED/Cluster Rekey tab, and click Rekey Now next to Cluster keys:

A scheduled rekey of the cluster keys (excluding the SED keys) can be configured from the CLI with the following syntax:

# isi keymanager cluster rekey modify –-key-rotation [YMWDhms]

Specify the frequency of the Key Rotation field as an integer, using Y for years, M for months, W for weeks, D for days, h for hours, m for minutes, and s for seconds. For example, the following command will schedule the cluster rekey operation to run every six weeks:

# isi keymanager cluster rekey view
 Rekey Time: 1970-01-01T00:00:00
 Key Rotation: Never
 # isi keymanager cluster rekey modify --key-rotation 6W
 # isi keymanager cluster rekey view
 Rekey Time: 2023-04-28T18:38:45
 Key Rotation: 6W

The rekey configuration can be easily reverted back to on demand from a schedule as follows:

# isi keymanager cluster rekey modify --key-rotation Never
 # isi keymanager cluster rekey view
 Rekey Time: 2023-04-28T18:38:45
 Key Rotation: Never

Alternatively, from the WebUI, under the SED/Cluster Rekey tab, select the Automatic rekey for Cluster keys checkbox and specify the rekey frequency. For example:

In an event of a rekeying failure, a CELOG KeyManagerRekeyFailed or KeyManagerSedsRekeyFailed event is created. Since SED rekey is a node-local operation, the KeyManagerSedsRekeyFailed event information will also include which node experienced the failure.

Additionally, current cluster rekey status can also be queried with the following CLI command:

# isi keymanager cluster status
Domain     Status  Key Creation Date   Error Info(if any)
----------------------------------------------------------
CELOG      ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
CERTSTORE  ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
CLOUDPOOLS ACTIVE   2023-04-06T09:19:16
EMAIL      ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
FTP        ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
IPMI_MGMT  ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
JWT        ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
LHOTSE     ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:11
NDMP       ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
NETWORK    ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
PSTORE     ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
RICE       ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
S3         ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
SIQ        ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
SNMP       ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
SRS        ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
SSO        ACTIVE  2023-04-06T09:19:16
----------------------------------------------------------
Total: 17

Or, for SEDs rekey status:

# isi keymanager sed status
 Node Status  Location   Remote Key ID  Key Creation Date   Error Info(if any)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1   LOCAL   Local                    1970-01-01T00:00:00
2   LOCAL   Local                    1970-01-01T00:00:00
3   LOCAL   Local                    1970-01-01T00:00:00
4   LOCAL   Local                    1970-01-01T00:00:00
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 4

The rekey process also outputs to the /var/log/isi_km_d.log file, which is a useful source for additional troubleshooting.

If an error in rekey occurs, the previous MK is not deleted, so entries in the provider store can still be created and read as normal. The key manager daemon will retry the rekey operation in the background every 15 minutes until it succeeds.

Author: Nick Trimbee

Among the slew of security enhancements introduced in OneFS 9.5 is the ability to mandate a more stringent password policy. This is required to comply with security requirements such as the U.S. military STIG, which stipulates:

The OneFS password security architecture can be summarized as follows:

Within the OneFS security subsystem, authentication is handled in OneFS by LSASSD, the daemon used to service authentication requests for lwiod.

In OneFS AIMA, there are several different kinds of backend providers: Local provider, file provider, AD provider, NIS provider, and so on. Each provider is responsible for the management of users and groups inside the provider. For OneFS password policy enforcement, the local and file providers are the focus.

The local provider is based on an SamDB style file stored with prefix path of /ifs/.ifsvar, and its provider settings can be viewed by the following CLI syntax: 

# isi auth local view System 

On the other hand, the file provider is based on the FreeBSD spwd.db file, and its configuration can be viewed by the following CLI command: 

# isi auth file view System

Each provider stores and manage its own users. For the local provider, isi auth users create CLI command will create a user inside the provider by default. However, for the file provider, there is no corresponding command. Instead, the OneFS pw CLI command can be used to create a new file provider user.

After the user is created, the isi auth users modify <USER> CLI command can be used to change the attributes of the user for both the file and local providers. However, not all attributes are supported for both providers. For example, the file provider does not support password expiry.

The fundamental password policy CLI changes introduced in OneFS 9.5 are as follows:

A user’s password can now be set, changed, and reset by either root or admin. This is supported by the new isi auth users change-password or isi auth users reset-password CLI command syntax. The latter, for example, returns a temporary password and requires the user to change it on next login. After logging in with the temporary (albeit secure) password, OneFS immediately forces the user to change it:

# whoami
admin
# isi auth users reset-password user1
4$_x\d\Q6V9E:sH
# ssh user1@localhost
(user1@localhost) Password:
(user1@localhost) Your password has expired.
You are required to immediately change your password.
Changing password for user1
New password:
(user1@localhost) Re-enter password:
Last login: Wed May 17 08:02:47 from 127.0.0.1
PowerScale OneFS 9.5.0.0
# whoami
user1

Also in OneFS 9.5 and later, the CLI isi auth local view system command sees the addition of four new fields:

• Password Chars Changed
• Password Percent Changed
• Password Hash Type
• Max Inactivity Days

For example:

# isi auth local view system
                    Name: System
                  Status: active
          Authentication: Yes
    Create Home Directory: Yes
 Home Directory Template: /ifs/home/%U
        Lockout Duration: Now
       Lockout Threshold: 0
          Lockout Window: Now
             Login Shell: /bin/zsh
            Machine Name:
        Min Password Age: Now
        Max Password Age: 4W
      Min Password Length: 0
     Password Prompt Time: 2W
      Password Complexity: -
 Password History Length: 0
   Password Chars Changed: 0
Password Percent Changed: 0
      Password Hash Type: NTHash
      Max Inactivity Days: 0

The following CLI command syntax configures OneFS to require a minimum password length of 15 characters, a 50% or greater change, and 8 or more characters to be altered for a successful password reset:

# isi auth local modify system --min-password-length 15 --password-chars-changed 8 --password-percent-changed 50

Next, a command is issued to create a new user, user2, with a 10-character password:

# isi auth users create user2 --password 0123456789
Failed to add user user1: The specified password does not meet the configured password complexity or history requirements

This attempt fails because the password does not meet the configured password criteria (15 chars, 50% change, 8 chars to be altered).

Instead, the password for the new account, user2, is set to an appropriate value: 0123456789abcdef. Also, the --prompt-password-change flag is used to force the user to change their password on next login.

# isi auth users create user2 --password 0123456789abcdef –prompt-password-change 1

When the user logs in to the user2 account, OneFS immediately prompts for a new password. In the following example, a non-compliant password (012345678zyxw) is entered. 

0123456789abcdef -> 012345678zyxw = Failure

This returns an unsuccessful change attempt failure because it does not meet the 15-character minimum:

# su user2
New password:
Re-enter password:
The specified password does not meet the configured password complexity requirements.
Your password must meet the following requirements:
  * Must contain at least 15 characters.
  * Must change at least 8 characters.
  * Must change at least 50% of characters.
New password:

Instead, a compliant password and successful change could be: 

0123456789abcdef -> 0123456zyxwvuts = Success

The following command can also be used to change the password for a user. For example, to update user2’s password:

# isi auth users change-password user2
Current password (hit enter if none):
New password:
Confirm new password:

If a non-compliant password is entered, the following error is returned:

Password change failed: The specified password does not meet the configured password complexity or history requirements

When employed, OneFS hardening automatically enforces security-based configurations. The hardening engine is profile-based, and its STIG security profile is predicated on security mandates specified in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Security Requirements Guides (SRGs) and Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs).

On applying the STIG hardening security profile to a cluster (isi hardening apply --profile=STIG), the password policy settings are automatically reconfigured to the following values:

For example:

# uname -or
Isilon OneFS 9.5.0.0
 
# isi hardening list
Name  Description                       Status
---------------------------------------------------
STIG  Enable all STIG security settings Applied
---------------------------------------------------
Total: 1
 
# isi auth local view system
                    Name: System
                  Status: active
          Authentication: Yes
   Create Home Directory: Yes
 Home Directory Template: /ifs/home/%U
        Lockout Duration: Now
       Lockout Threshold: 3
          Lockout Window: 15m
             Login Shell: /bin/zsh
             Machine Name:
        Min Password Age: 1D
        Max Password Age: 8W4D
     Min Password Length: 15
    Password Prompt Time: 2W
     Password Complexity: lowercase, numeric, repeat, symbol, uppercase
 Password History Length: 5
  Password Chars Changed: 8
Password Percent Changed: 50
      Password Hash Type: SHA512
     Max Inactivity Days: 35

Note that Password Hash Type is changed from the default NTHash to the more secure SHA512 encoding, in addition to setting the various password criteria.

The OneFS 9.5 WebUI also sees several additions and alterations to the Password policy page. These include:

The most obvious change is the transfer of the policy configuration elements from the local provider page to a new dedicated Password policy page.

Here’s the OneFS 9.4 View a local provider page, under Access > Authentication providers > Local providers > System:

This is replaced and augmented in the OneFS 9.5 WebUI with the following page, located under Access > Membership and roles > Password policy:

New password policy configuration options are included to require uppercase, lowercase, numeric, or special characters and limit the number of contiguous repeats of a character, and so on.

When it comes to changing a password, only a permitted user can make their change. This can be performed from a couple of locations in the WebUI. First, the user options on the task bar at the top of each screen now provides a Change password option:

A pop-up warning message will also be displayed by the WebUI, informing the user when password expiration is imminent. This warning provides a Change Password link:

Clicking on the Change Password link displays the following page:

A new password complexity tool-tip message is also displayed, informing the user of safe password selection.

Note that re-login is required after a password change.

On the Users page under Access > Membership and roles > Users, the Action drop-down list on the now also contains a Reset Password option:

The successful reset confirmation pop-up offers both a show and copy option, while informing the cluster administrator to share the new password with the user, and for them to change their password during their next login:  

The Create user page now provides an additional field that requires password confirmation. Additionally, the password complexity tool-tip message is also displayed:

The redesigned Edit user details page no longer provides a field to edit the password directly:

Instead, the Action drop-down list on the Users page now contains a Reset Password option. 

Author: Nick Trimbee

In the first article in this series, we took a look at the architecture of the new OneFS WebUI SSO functionality. Now, we move on to its provisioning and setup.

SSO on PowerScale can be configured through either the OneFS WebUI or CLI. OneFS 9.5 debuts a new dedicated WebUI SSO configuration page under Access > Authentication Providers > SSO. Alternatively, for command line afficionados, the CLI now includes a new isi auth sso command set.

Here is the overall configuration flow:

 
1.  Upgrade to OneFS 9.5

First, ensure the cluster is running OneFS 9.5 or a later release. If upgrading from an earlier OneFS version, note that the SSO service requires this upgrade to be committed prior to configuration and use.

Next, configure an SSO administrator. In OneFS, this account requires at least one of the following privileges:

The user account used for identity provider management should have an associated email address configured.

2.  Setup Identity Provider

OneFS SSO activation also requires having a suitable identity provider (IdP), such as ADFS, provisioned and available before setting up OneFS SSO.

ADFS can be configured through either the Windows GUI or command shell, and detailed information on the deployment and configuration of ADFS can be found in the Microsoft Windows Server documentation.

 
The Windows remote desktop utility (RDP) can be used to provision, connect to, and configure an ADFS server.

1. When connected to ADFS, configure a rule defining access. For example, the following command line syntax can be used to create a simple rule that permits all users to log in:
   

   $AuthRules = @" 
   @RuleTemplate="AllowAllAuthzRule" => issue(Type = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ 
   authorization/claims/permit", Value="true"); 
   "@

   or from the ADFS UI:

   
   Note that more complex rules can be crafted to meet the particular requirements of an organization.
2. Create a rule parameter to map the Active Directory user email address to the SAML NameID.
   

   $TransformRules = @" 
   @RuleTemplate = "LdapClaims" 
   @RuleName = "LDAP mail" 
   c:[Type == "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/ 
   windowsaccountname", Issuer == "AD AUTHORITY"] 
         => issue(store = "Active Directory", 
              types = 
              ("http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/
              emailaddress"), query = ";mail;{0}", param = c.Value); 
   @RuleTemplate = "MapClaims" 
   @RuleName = "NameID" 
   c:[Type == 
   "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/emailaddress"] 
         => issue(Type = 
   "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/ 
   nameidentifier", Issuer = c.
               Issuer, OriginalIssuer = c.OriginalIssuer, 
               Value = c.Value, ValueType = c.ValueType, 
               Properties["http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity
               / claimproperties/format"] = 
               "urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:emailAddress"); 
   "@

3. Configure AD to trust the OneFS WebUI certificate.
4. Create the relying party trust.
   
   

   Add-AdfsRelyingPartyTrust -Name <cluster-name>\ 
        -MetadataUrl "https://<cluster-node-
   ip>:8080/session/1/saml/metadata" \ 
        -IssuanceAuthorizationRules $AuthRules -IssuanceTransformRules 
   $TransformRules 

or from Windows Server Manager:

3.  Select Access Zone

 Because OneFS SSO is zone-aware, the next step involves choosing the access zone to configure. Go to Access > Authentication providers > SSO, select an access zone (that is, the system zone), and click Add IdP.

 Note that each of a cluster’s access zone or zones must have an IdP configured for it. The same IdP can be used for all the zones, but each access zone must be configured separately.

4.  Add IdP Configuration

 In OneFS 9.5 and later, the WebUI SSO configuration is a wizard-driven, “guided workflow” process involving the following steps:

 
First, go to Access > Authentication providers > SSO, select an access zone (that is, the system zone), and then click Add IdP.

 
On the Add Identity Provider page, enter a unique name for the IdP. For example, Isln-IdP1 in this case:

 
When done, click Next, select the default Upload metadata XML option, and browse to the XML file downloaded from the ADFS system:

 
Alternatively, if the preference is to enter the information by hand, select Manual entry and complete the configuration form fields:

 
If the manual entry method is selected, you must have the IdP certificate ready to upload. With the manual entry option, the following information is required:

Upload the IdP certificate:

 
For example:

Repeat this step for each access zone in which SSO is to be configured.

When complete, click Next to move on to the service provider configuration step.

5.  Configure Service Provider

 On the Service Provider page, confirm that the current access zone is carried over from the previous page.

Select Metadata download or Manual copy, depending on the chosen method of entering OneFS details about this service provider (SP) to the IdP.

 
Provide the hostname or IP address for the SP for the current access zone.

 
Click Generate to create the information (metadata) about OneFS and this access zone for use in configuring the IdP.

This generated information can now be used to configure the IdP (in this case, Windows ADFS) to accept requests from PowerScale as the SP and its configured access zone.

As shown, the WebUI page provides two methods for obtaining the information:

 
Next, download the Signing Certificate.

 
When completed, click Next to finish the configuration.

6.  Enable SSO and Verify Operation

Once the IdP and SP are configured, a cluster admin can enable SSO per access zone through the OneFS WebUI by going to Access > Authentication providers > SSO. From here, select the access zone and select the toggle to enable SSO:

 Or from the OneFS CLI, use the following syntax:

# isi auth sso settings modify --sso-enabled 1

Author: Nick Trimbee

The Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is an open standard for sharing security information about identity, authentication, and authorization across different systems. SAML is implemented using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard for sharing data. The SAML framework enables single sign-on (SSO), which in turn allows users to log in once, and their login credential can be reused to authenticate with and access other different service providers. It defines several entities including end users, service providers, and identity providers, and is used to manage identity information. For example, the Windows Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) is one of the ubiquitous identity providers for SAML contexts.

OneFS 9.5 introduces SAML-based SSO for the WebUI to provide a more convenient authentication method, in addition to meeting the security compliance requirements for federal and enterprise customers. In OneFS 9.5, the WebUI’s initial login page has been redesigned to support SSO and, when enabled, a new Log in with SSO button is displayed on the login page under the traditional username and password text boxes. For example:

 
OneFS SSO is also zone-aware in support of multi-tenant cluster configurations. As such, a separate IdP can be configured independently for each OneFS access zone.

Under the hood, OneFS SSO employs the following high-level architecture:

In OneFS 9.5, the SSO operates through HTTP REDIRECT and POST bindings, with the cluster acting as the service provider. 

There are three different types of SAML Assertions—authentication, attribute, and authorization decision.

• Authentication assertions prove identification of the user and provide the time the user logged in and what method of authentication they used (that is, Kerberos, two-factor, and so on).
• The attribution assertion passes the SAML attributes to the service provider. SAML attributes are specific pieces of data that provide information about the user.
• An authorization decision assertion states whether the user is authorized to use the service or if the identify provider denied their request due to a password failure or lack of rights to the service.

SAML SSO works by transferring the user’s identity from one place (the identity provider) to another (the service provider). This is done through an exchange of digitally signed XML documents.

A SAML Request, also known as an authentication request, is generated by the service provider to “request” an authentication.

A SAML Response is generated by the identity provider and contains the actual assertion of the authenticated user. In addition, a SAML Response may contain additional information, such as user profile information and group/role information, depending on what the service provider can support. Note that the service provider never directly interacts with the identity provider, with a browser acting as the agent facilitating any redirections.

Because SAML authentication is asynchronous, the service provider does not maintain the state of any authentication requests. As such, when the service provider receives a response from an identity provider, the response must contain all the necessary information.

The general flow is as follows:

When OneFS redirects a user to the configured IdP for login, it makes an HTTP GET request (SAMLRequest), instructing the IdP that the cluster is attempting to perform a login (SAMLAuthnRequest). When the user successfully authenticates, the IdP responds back to OneFS with an HTTP POST containing an HTML form (SAMLResponse) that indicates whether the login was successful, who logged in, plus any additional claims configured on the IdP. 

On receiving the SAMLResponse, OneFS verifies the signature using the public key (X.509 certificate) in to ensure that it really came from its trusted IdP and that none of the contents have been tampered with. OneFS then extracts the identity of the user, along with any other pertinent attributes. At this point, the user is redirected back to the OneFS WebUI dashboard (landing page), as if logged into the site manually.

In the next article in this series, we’ll take a detailed look at the following procedure to deploy SSO on a PowerScale cluster:

Author: Nick Trimbee

Another of the core security enhancements introduced in OneFS 9.5 is the ability to enforce strict user account security policies. This is required for compliance with both private and public sector security mandates. For example, the account policy restriction requirements expressed within the U.S. military STIG requirements stipulate:

 To directly address these security edicts, OneFS 9.5 adds the following account policy restriction controls:

Architecture

OneFS provides a variety of access mechanisms for administering a cluster. These include SSH, serial console, WebUI, and platform API, all of which use different underlying access methods. The serial console and SSH are standard FreeBSD third-party applications and are accounted for per node, whereas the WebUI and pAPI use HTTP module extensions to facilitate access to the system and services and are accounted for cluster-wide. Before OneFS 9.5, there was no common mechanism to represent or account for sessions across these disparate applications.

Under the hood, the OneFS account security policy framework encompasses the following high-level architecture: 

With SSH, there’s no explicit or reliable “log-off” event sent to OneFS, beyond actually disconnecting the connection. As such, accounting for active sessions can be problematic and unreliable, especially when connections time out or unexpectedly disconnect. However, OneFS does include an accounting database that stores records of system activities like user login and logout, which can be queried to determine active SSH sessions. Each active SSH connection has an isi_ssh_d process owned by the account associated with it, and this information can be gathered via standard syscalls. OneFS enumerates the number of SSHD processes per account to calculate the total number of active established sessions. This value is then used as part of the total concurrent administrative sessions limit. Since SSH only supports user access through the system zone, there is no need for any zone-aware accounting.

The WebUI and platform API use JSON web tokens (JWTs) for authenticated sessions. OneFS stores the JWTs in the cluster-wide kvstore, and access policy uses valid session tokens in the kvstore to account for active sessions when a user logs on through the WebUI or pAPI. When the user logs off, the associated token is removed, and a message is sent to JWT service with an explicit log off notification. If a session times out or disconnects, the JWT service will not get an event, but the tokens have a limited, short lifespan, and any expired tokens are purged from the list on a scheduled basis in conjunction with the JWT timer. OneFS enumerates the unique session IDs associated with each user’s JWT tokens in the kvstore to get a number of active WebUI and pAPI sessions to use as part of user’s session limit check.

For serial console access accounting, the process table will have information when an STTY connection is active, and OneFS extrapolates user data from it to determine the session count, similar to ssh with a syscall for process data. There is an accounting database that stores records of system activities like user login and logout, which is also queried for active console sessions. Serial console access is only from the system zone, so there is no need for zone-aware accounting.

An API call retrieves user session data from the process table and kvstore to calculate number of user active sessions. As such, the checking and enforcement of session limits is performed in similar manner to the verification of user privileges for SSH, serial console, or WebUI access.

Delaying failed login reconnections

OneFS 9.5 provides the ability to enforce a configurable delay period. This delay is specified in seconds, after which every unsuccessful authentication attempt results in the user being denied the ability to reconnect to the cluster until after the configured delay period has passed. The login delay period is defined in seconds through the FailedLoginDelayTime global attribute and, by default, OneFS is configured for no delay through a FailedLoginDelayTime value of 0. When a cluster is placed into hardened mode with the STIG policy enacted, the delay value is automatically set to 4 seconds. Note that the delay happens in the lsass client, so that the authentication service is not affected.

The configured failed login delay time limit can be viewed with following CLI command:

# isi auth settings global view
                            Send NTLMv2: No
                      Space Replacement:
                              Workgroup: WORKGROUP
               Provider Hostname Lookup: disabled
                          Alloc Retries: 5
                 User Object Cache Size: 47.68M
                       On Disk Identity: native
                         RPC Block Time: Now
                       RPC Max Requests: 64
                            RPC Timeout: 30s
Default LDAP TLS Revocation Check Level: none
                   System GID Threshold: 80
                   System UID Threshold: 80
                         Min Mapped Rid: 2147483648
                              Group UID: 4294967292
                               Null GID: 4294967293
                               Null UID: 4294967293
                            Unknown GID: 4294967294
                            Unknown UID: 4294967294
                Failed Login Delay Time: Now
               Concurrent Session Limit: 0

Similarly, the following syntax will configure the failed login delay time to a value of 4 seconds:

# isi auth settings global modify --failed-login-delay-time 4s
# isi auth settings global view | grep -i delay
                Failed Login Delay Time: 4s

However, when a cluster is put into STIG hardening mode, the “Concurrent sessions limit” is automatically set to 10.

# isi auth settings global view | grep -i delay
                Failed Login Delay Time: 10s

The delay time after login failure can also be configured from the WebUI under Access > Settings > Global provider settings:

The valid range of the FailedLoginDelayTime global attribute is from 0 to 65535, and the delay time is limited to the same cluster node.

Note that this maximum session limit is only applicable to administrative logins.

Disabling inactive accounts

In OneFS 9.5, any user account that has been inactive for a configurable duration can be automatically disabled. Administrative intervention is required to re-enable a deactivated user account. The last activity time of a user is determined by their previous logon, and a timer runs every midnight during which all “inactive” accounts are disabled. If the last logon record for a user is unavailable, or stale, the timestamp when the account was enabled is taken as their last activity instead. If inactivity tracking is enabled after the last logon (or enabled) time of a user, the inactivity tracking time is considered for inactivity period.

This feature is disabled by default in OneFS, and all users are exempted from inactivity tracking until configured otherwise. However, individual accounts can be exempted from this behavior, and this can be configured through the user-specific DisableWhenInactive attribute. For example:

# isi auth user view user1 | grep -i inactive
   Disable When Inactive: Yes
# isi auth user modify user1 --disable-when-inactive 0
# isi auth user view user1 | grep -i inactive
   Disable When Inactive: No

If a cluster is put into STIG hardened mode, the value for the MaxInactivityDays parameter is automatically reconfigured to 35, meaning a user will be disabled after 35 days of inactivity. All the local users are removed from exemption when in STIG hardened mode.

Note that this functionality is limited to only the local provider and does not apply to file providers.

The inactive account disabling configuration can be viewed from the CLI with the following syntax. In this example, the MaxInactivityDays attribute is configured for 35 days:

# isi auth local view system
                    Name: System
                  Status: active
          Authentication: Yes
   Create Home Directory: Yes
 Home Directory Template: /ifs/home/%U
        Lockout Duration: Now
       Lockout Threshold: 0
          Lockout Window: Now
             Login Shell: /bin/zsh
            Machine Name:
        Min Password Age: Now
        Max Password Age: 4W
     Min Password Length: 15
    Password Prompt Time: 2W
     Password Complexity: -
 Password History Length: 0
  Password Chars Changed: 8
Password Percent Changed: 50
      Password Hash Type: NTHash
     Max Inactivity Days: 35

Inactive account disabling can also be configured from the WebUI under Access > Authentication providers > Local provider:

The valid range of the MaxInactivityDays parameter is from 0 to UINT_MAX. As such, the following CLI syntax will configure the maximum number of days a user account can be inactive before it will be disabled to 10 days:

# isi auth local modify system --max-inactivity-days 10
# isi auth local view system | grep -i inactiv
     Max Inactivity Days: 0tem –max-inactivity-days 10

Setting this value to 0 days will disable the feature:

# isi auth local modify system --max-inactivity-days 0
# isi auth local view system | grep -i inactiv
     Max Inactivity Days: 0tem –max-inactivity-days 0

Inactivity account disabling, as well as password expiry, can also be configured granularly, per user account. For example, user1 has a default configuration of the Disable When Inactive threshold set to No.

# isi auth users view user1
                    Name: user1
                      DN: CN=user1,CN=Users,DC=GLADOS
              DNS Domain: -
                  Domain: GLADOS
                Provider: lsa-local-provider:System
        Sam Account Name: user1
                     UID: 2000
                     SID: S-1-5-21-1839173366-2940572996-2365153926-1000
                 Enabled: Yes
                 Expired: No
                  Expiry: -
                  Locked: No
                   Email: -
                   GECOS: -
           Generated GID: No
           Generated UID: No
           Generated UPN: Yes
           Primary Group
                          ID: GID:1800
                        Name: Isilon Users
          Home Directory: /ifs/home/user1
        Max Password Age: 4W
        Password Expired: No
         Password Expiry: 2023-06-15T17:45:55
       Password Last Set: 2023-05-18T17:45:55
        Password Expired: No
              Last Logon: -
                   Shell: /bin/zsh
                     UPN: user1@GLADOS
User Can Change Password: Yes
   Disable When Inactive: No

The following CLI command will activate the account inactivity disabling setting and enable password expiry for the user1 account:

# isi auth users modify user1 --disable-when-inactive Yes --password-expires Yes 

Inactive account disabling can also be configured from the WebUI under Access > Membership and roles > Users > Providers:

Limiting concurrent sessions

OneFS 9.5 can limit the number of administrative sessions active on a OneFS cluster node, and all WebUI, SSH, pAPI, and serial console sessions are accounted for when calculating the session limit. The SSH and console session count is node-local, whereas WebUI and pAPI sessions are tracked cluster-wide. As such, the formula used to calculate a node’s total active sessions is as follows:

Total active user sessions on a node = Total WebUI and pAPI sessions across the cluster + Total SSH and Console sessions on the node

This feature leverages the cluster-wide session management through JWT for calculating the total number of sessions on a cluster’s node. By default, OneFS 9.5 has no configured limit, and the Concurrent Session Limit parameter has a value of 0. For example:

# isi auth settings global view
                            Send NTLMv2: No
                      Space Replacement:
                              Workgroup: WORKGROUP
               Provider Hostname Lookup: disabled
                          Alloc Retries: 5
                 User Object Cache Size: 47.68M
                       On Disk Identity: native
                         RPC Block Time: Now
                       RPC Max Requests: 64
                            RPC Timeout: 30s
Default LDAP TLS Revocation Check Level: none
                   System GID Threshold: 80
                   System UID Threshold: 80
                         Min Mapped Rid: 2147483648
                              Group UID: 4294967292
                               Null GID: 4294967293
                               Null UID: 4294967293
                            Unknown GID: 4294967294
                            Unknown UID: 4294967294
                Failed Login Delay Time: Now
               Concurrent Session Limit: 0

The following CLI syntax will configure Concurrent Session Limit to a value of 5:

# isi auth settings global modify –-concurrent-session-limit 5
# isi auth settings global view | grep -i concur
                Concurrent Session Limit: 5

Once the session limit has been exceeded, attempts to connect, in this case as root through SSH, will be met with the following Access denied error message:

login as: root
Keyboard-interactive authentication prompts from server:
| Password:
End of keyboard-interactive prompts from server                      
Access denied
password:

The concurrent sessions limit can also be configured from the WebUI under Access > Settings > Global provider settings:

However, when a cluster is put into STIG hardening mode, the concurrent session limit is automatically set to a maximum of 10 sessions.

Note that this maximum session limit is only applicable to administrative logins.

Performance

Disabling an account after a period of inactivity in OneFS requires a SQLite database update every time a user has successfully logged on to the OneFS cluster. After a successful logon, the time to logon is recorded in the database, which is later used to compute the inactivity period.

Inactivity tracking is disabled by default in OneFS 9.5, but can be easily enabled by configuring the MaxInactivityDays attribute to a non-zero value. In cases where inactivity tracking is enabled and many users are not exempt from inactivity tracking, a significant number of logons within a short period of time can generate significant SQLite database requests. However, OneFS consolidates multiple database updates during user logon to a single commit to minimize the overall load.

Troubleshooting

When it comes to troubleshooting OneFS account security policy configurations, there are these main logfiles to check:

• /var/log/lsassd.log
• /var/log/messages
• /var/log/isi_papi_d.log

For additional reporting detail, debug level logging can be enabled on the lsassd.log file with the following CLI command:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwsm set-log-level lsass – debug

When finished, logging can be returned to the regular error level:

# /us/likewise/bin/lwsm set-log-level lsass - error

Author: Nick Trimbee

Of the many changes in OneFS 9.5, the most exciting are the performance enhancements on the NVMe-based PowerScale nodes: F900 and F600. These performance increases are the result of some significant changes “under-the-hood” to OneFS. In the lead-up to the National Association of Broadcasters show last April, I wanted to qualify how much of a difference the extra performance would make for Adobe Premiere Pro video editing workflows. Adobe is one of Dell’s biggest media software partners, and Premiere Pro is crucial to all sorts of media production, from broadcast to cinema.

The awesome news is that the changes to OneFS make a big difference. I saw 40% more video streams with the software upgrade: up to 140 streams of UHD ProRes422 from a single F900 node!

Changes to OneFS

Broadly speaking, there were changes to three areas in OneFS that resulted in the performance boost in version 9.5. These areas are L2 cache, backend networking, and prefetch.

L2 cache -- Being smart about how and when to bypass L2 cache and read directly from NVMe is one part of the OneFS 9.5 performance story. PowerScale OneFS clusters maintain a globally accessible L2 cache for all nodes in the cluster. Manipulating L2 cache can be “expensive” computationally speaking. During a read, the cluster needs to determine what data is in cache, whether the read should be added to cache, and what data should be expired from cache. NVMe storage is so performant that bypassing the L2 cache and reading data directly from NVMe frees up cluster resources. Doing so results in even faster reads on nodes that support it.  

Backend networking -- OneFS uses a private backend network for internode communication. With the massive performance of NVMe based storage and the introduction of 100 GbE, limits were getting reached on this private network. OneFS 9.5 gets around these limitations with a custom multichannel approach (similar in concept to nconnect from the NFS world for the Linux folks out there). In OneFS 9.5, the connection channels on the backend network are bonded in a carefully orchestrated way to parallelize some aspects, while still keeping a predictable message ordering.

Prefetch -- The last part of the performance boost for OneFS 9.5 comes from improved file prefetch. How OneFS prefetches file system metadata was reworked to more optimally read ahead at the different depths of the metadata tree. Efficiency was improved and “jitter” between file system processes minimized.

Our lab setup

First a little background on PowerScale and OneFS. PowerScale is the updated name for the Isilon product line. The new PowerScale nodes are based on Dell servers with compute, RAM, networking, and storage. PowerScale is a scale-out, clustered network-attached-storage (NAS) solution. To build a OneFS file system, PowerScale nodes are joined to create cluster. The cluster creates a single NAS file system with the aggregate resources of all the nodes in the cluster. Client systems connect using a DNS name, and OneFS SmartConnect balances client connections between the various nodes. No matter which node the client connects to, that client has the potential to access all the data on the entire cluster. Further, the client systems benefit from the all the nodes acting in concert.

Even before the performance enhancements in OneFS 9.5, the NVMe-based PowerScale nodes were speedy, so a robust lab environment was going to be needed to stress the system. For this particular set of tests, I had access to 16 workstations running the latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro 2023. Each workstation ran Windows 10 with Nvidia GPU, Intel processor, and 10 GbE networking. On the storage side, the tests were performed against a minimum sized 3-node F900 PowerScale cluster with 100 GbE networking.

Adobe Premiere Pro excels at compressed video editing. The trick with compressed video is that an individual client workstation will get overwhelmed long before the storage system. As such, it is critical to evaluate whether any dropped frames are the result of storage or an overwhelmed workstation. A simple test is to take a single workstation and start playing back parallel compressed video streams, such as ProRes 422. Keeping a close watch on the workstation performance monitors, at a certain point CPU and GPU usage will spike and frames will drop. This test will show the maximum number of streams that a single workstation can handle. Because this test is all about storage performance, keeping the number of streams per workstation to a healthy range takes individual workstation performance out of the equation.

I settled on 10x streams of ProRes 422 UHD video running at 30 frames per second per workstation. Each individual video stream was ~70 MBps (560mbps). Running ten of these streams meant each workstation was pulling around 700 MBps (though with Premiere Pro prefetching this number was closer to 800 MBps). With this number of video streams, the workstation wasn’t working too hard and it was well within what would fit down a 10 GbE network pipe.

Running some quick math here, 16 workstations each pulling 800-ish MBps works out to about 12.5 GBps of total throughput. This throughput is not enough throughput to overwhelm even a small 3-node F900 cluster. In order to stress the system, all 16 workstations were manually pointed to single 100 GbE port on a single F900 node. Due to the clustered nature of OneFS, the clients will get benefit from the entire cluster. But even with the rest of the cluster behind it, at a certain point, a single F900 node is going to get overwhelmed.

Figure 1.  OneFS Lab configuration

Test methodology

The first step was to import test media for playback. Each workstation accessed its own unique set of 10x one-hour long UHD ProRes422 clips. Then a separate Premiere Pro project was created for each workstation with 10 simultaneous layers of video. The plan was to start playback one by one on each workstation and see where the tipping point was for that single PowerScale F900 node. The test was to be run first with OneFS 9.4 and then with OneFS 9.5.

Adobe Premiere Pro has a debug overlay called DogEars. In addition to showing dropped frames, DogEars provides some useful metrics about how “healthy” video playback is in Premiere Pro. Even before a system starts to drop frames, latency spikes and low prefetch buffers show when Premiere Pro is struggling to sustain playback.

The metrics in DogEars that I was focused on were the following:

Dropped frames: This metric is obvious, dropped frames are unacceptable. However, at times Premiere Pro will show single digit dropped frames at playback start.

FramePrefetchLatency: This metric only shows up during playback. The latency starts high while the prefetch frame buffer is filling. When that buffer gets up to slightly over 300 frames, the latency drops down to around 20 to 30 milliseconds. When the storage system was overwhelmed, this prefetch latency goes well above 30 milliseconds and stays there.

CompleteAheadOfPlay: This metric also only shows up during playback. The number of frames creeps up during playback and settles in at slightly over 300 prefetched frames. The FramePrefetchLatency above will be high (in the 100ms range or so) until the 300 frames are prefetched, at which point the latency will drop down to 30ms or lower. When the storage system is stressed, Premiere Pro is never able to fill this prefetch buffer, and it never gets up to the 300+ frames.

Figure 2.  Premiere Pro with Dogears overlay

Test results

With the test environment configured and the individual projects loaded, it was time to see what the system could provide.  

With the PowerScale cluster running OneFS 9.4, playback was initiated on each Adobe Premiere workstation. Keep in mind that all the workstations were artificially pointed to a single node in this 3-node F900 cluster. That single F900 node running OneFS 9.4 could handle 10x of the workstations, each playing back 10x UHD streams. That’s 100x streams of UHD ProRes 422 video from one node. Not too shabby.  

At 110x streams (11 workstations), no frames were dropped, but the CompleteAheadOfPlay number on all the workstations started to go below 300. Also, the FramePreFetchLatency spiked to over 100 milliseconds. Clearly, the storage node was unable to provide more performance.

After reproducing these results several times to confirm accuracy, we unmounted the storage from each workstation and upgraded the F900 cluster to OneFS 9.5. Time to see how much of a difference the OneFS 9.5 performance boost would make for Premiere Pro.

As before, each workstation loaded a unique project with unique ProRes media. At 100x streams of video, playback chugged along fine. Time to load up additional streams and see where things break. 110, 120, 130, 140… playback from the single F900 node continued to chug along with no drops and acceptable latency. It was only at 150 streams of video that playback began to suffer. By this time, that single F900 node was pumping close to 10GBps out of that single 100 GbE NIC port. These 14x workstations were not entirely saturating the connection, but getting close. And the performance was a 40% bump from the OneFS 9.4 numbers. Impressive.

Figure 3.  isi statistics output with 140 streams of video from a single node

These results exceeded my expectations going into the project. Getting a 40% performance boost with a code upgrade to existing hardware is impressive. This increase lined up with some of the benchmarking tools used by engineering. But performance from a benchmark tool vs. a real-world application are often two entirely different things. Benchmark tools are particularly inaccurate for video playback where small increases in latency can result in unacceptable results. Because Adobe Premiere is one of the most widely used applications  with PowerScale storage, it made sense as a test platform to gauge these differences. For more information about PowerScale storage and media, check out https://Dell.to/media.

Click here to learn more about the author, Gregory Shiff

In my role as technical lead for media workflows at Dell Technologies, I’m fortunate to partner with companies making some of the best tools for creatives. FilmLight is undeniably one of those companies. Baselight by FilmLight is used in the highest end of feature film production. I was eager to put the latest all-flash PowerScale OneFS nodes to the test and see how those storage nodes could support Baselight workflows. I’m pleased to say that PowerScale supports Baselight very well, and I’m able to share best practices for integrating PowerScale into Baselight environments.

Baselight is a color grading and image-processing system that is widely used in cinematic production. Traditionally, Baselight DI workflows are the domain of SAN or block storage. The journey towards supporting modern DI workflows on PowerScale started with OneFS’s support of NFS-over-RDMA. Using the RDMA protocol with PowerScale all flash storage allows for high throughput workflows that are unobtainable with TCP. Using RDMA for media applications is well documented in the blog and white paper: NFS over RDMA for Media Workflows.

With successful RDMA testing on other color correction software complete, I was confident that we could add Baselight to the list of supported platforms. The time seemed ripe, and FilmLight agreed to work with us on getting it done. In partnership with the FilmLight team in LA, we got Baselight One up and running in the Seattle media lab.

FilmLightOS already has a driver installed that supports RDMA for the NIC in the workstation. This made configuration easy, because no additional software had to be installed to support the protocol (at least in our case). While RDMA remains the best choice for using PowerScale with Baselight, not all networks can support RDMA. The good news here is that there is another option: nconnect.

The Linux distribution that Baselight runs on also supports the NFS nconnect mount option. Nconnect allows for multiple TCP connections between the Baselight client and the PowerScale storage. Testing with nconnect demonstrated enough throughput to support 8K uncompressed playback from PowerScale. While RDMA is preferred, it is not an absolute requirement.

With the storage mounted and performing as expected, we set about adjusting Baselight threads and DirectIO settings to optimize the interaction of Baselight and PowerScale. The results of this testing showed that increasing BaseLight’s thread count to 16 improved performance. (These threads were unrelated to the nconnect connections mentioned above.) DirectIO is a mechanism that bypasses some caching layers in Linux. DirectIO improved Baselight’s write performance and degraded read performance. Thankfully, Baselight is flexible enough to selectively enable DirectIO only for writes.

PowerScale is an easy win for Baselight One. However, Baselight also comes in other variations: Baselight Two and Baselight X. These versions of Baselight have separate processing nodes and host UI devices to tackle the most challenging workflows. These Baselight systems share configuration files that can cause issues with how the storage is mounted on the processing nodes as compared to the host UI nodes. When using RDMA, the processing nodes will use an RDMA mount while the host UI will use TCP. Working with the FilmLight team in LA, changes were made to support separate mount options for the processing nodes vs, host UI node.

Getting to know Baselight and partnering with FilmLight on this project was highly satisfying. It would not have been easy to understand the finer intricacies of how Baselight interacts with storage without their help (the rendering and caching mechanisms within Baselight are awesome).

For more details about how to use PowerScale with Baselight, check out the full white paper: PowerScale OneFS: Baselight by FilmLight Best Practices and Configuration.

For more information, and the latest content on Dell Media and Entertainment storage solutions, visit us online. 

Click here to learn more about the author, Gregory Shiff  

Complementary to the restricted shell itself, which was covered in the previous article in this series, OneFS 9.5 also sees the addition of a new log viewer, plus a recovery shell option.

The new isi_log_access CLI utility enables an SSH user to read, page, and query the log files in the /var/log directory. The ability to run this tool is governed by the user’s role being granted the ISI_PRIV_SYS_SUPPORT role-based access control (RBAC) privilege.

OneFS RBAC is used to explicitly limit who has access to the range of cluster configurations and operations. This granular control allows for crafting of administrative roles, which can create and manage the various OneFS core components and data services, isolating each to specific security roles or to admin only, and so on.

In this case, a cluster security administrator selects the access zone, creates a zone-aware role within it, assigns the ISI_PRIV_SYS_SUPPORT privileges for isi_log_access use, and then assigns users to the role.

Note that the integrated OneFS AuditAdmin RBAC role does not contain the ISI_PRIV_SYS_SUPPORT privileges by default. Also, the integrated RBAC roles cannot be reconfigured:

# isi auth roles modify AuditAdmin --add-priv=ISI_PRIV_SYS_SUPPORT
The privileges of built-in role AuditAdmin cannot be modified

Therefore, the ISI_PRIV_SYS_SUPPORT role has to be added to a custom role.

For example, the following CLI syntax adds the user usr_admin_restricted to the rl_ssh role and adds the privilege ISI_PRIV_SYS_SUPPORT to the rl_ssh role:

# isi auth roles modify rl_ssh --add-user=usr_admin_restricted
# isi auth roles modify rl_ssh --add-priv=ISI_PRIV_SYS_SUPPORT
# isi auth roles view rl_ssh
        Name: rl_ssh
 Description: -
     Members: u_ssh_restricted
              u_admin_restricted
  Privileges
              ID: ISI_PRIV_LOGIN_SSH
      Permission: r
             ID: ISI_PRIV_SYS_SUPPORT
      Permission: r

The usr_admin_restricted user could also be added to the AuditAdmin role:

# isi auth roles modify AuditAdmin --add-user=usr_admin_restricted
# isi auth roles view AuditAdmin | grep -i member
     Members: usr_admin_restricted

The isi_log_access tool supports the following command options and arguments:

Here the u_admin_restricted user logs in to the SSH and runs the isi_log_access utility to list the /var/log/messages log file:

# ssh u_admin_restricted@10.246.178.121
 (u_admin_restricted@10.246.178.121) 
 Password:
 Last login: Wed May  3 18:02:18 2023 from 10.246.159.107
 Copyright (c) 2001-2023 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved.
 Copyright (c) 1992-2018 The FreeBSD Project.
 Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
         The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
PowerScale OneFS 9.5.0.0
Allowed commands are
         clear ...
         isi ...
         isi_recovery_shell ...
         isi_log_access ...
         exit
         logout
 # isi_log_access –list
 LAST MODIFICATION TIME         SIZE       FILE
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         alert.log
 Fri May  5 00:30:00 2023       62         all.log
 Fri May  5 00:30:00 2023       99         all.log.0.gz
 Fri May  5 00:00:00 2023       106        all.log.1.gz
 Thu May  4 00:30:00 2023       100        all.log.2.gz
 Thu May  4 00:00:00 2023       107        all.log.3.gz
 Wed May  3 00:30:00 2023       99         all.log.4.gz
 Wed May  3 00:00:00 2023       107        all.log.5.gz
 Tue May  2 00:30:00 2023       100        all.log.6.gz
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         audit_config.log
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         audit_protocol.log
 Fri May  5 17:23:53 2023       82064      auth.log
 Sat Apr 22 12:09:31 2023       10750      auth.log.0.gz
 Mon Apr 10 15:31:36 2023       0          bam.log
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         boxend.log
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         bwt.log
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         cloud_interface.log
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         console.log
 Fri May  5 18:20:32 2023       23769      cron
 Fri May  5 15:30:00 2023       8803       cron.0.gz
 Fri May  5 03:10:00 2023       9013       cron.1.gz
 Thu May  4 15:00:00 2023       8847       cron.2.gz
 Fri May  5 03:01:02 2023       3012       daily.log
 Fri May  5 00:30:00 2023       101        daily.log.0.gz
 Fri May  5 00:00:00 2023       1201       daily.log.1.gz
 Thu May  4 00:30:00 2023       102        daily.log.2.gz
 Thu May  4 00:00:00 2023       1637       daily.log.3.gz
 Wed May  3 00:30:00 2023       101        daily.log.4.gz
 Wed May  3 00:00:00 2023       1200       daily.log.5.gz
 Tue May  2 00:30:00 2023       102        daily.log.6.gz
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         debug.log
 Tue Apr 11 12:29:37 2023       3694       diskpools.log
 Fri May  5 03:01:00 2023       244566     dmesg.today
 Thu May  4 03:01:00 2023       244662     dmesg.yesterday
 Tue Apr 11 11:49:32 2023       788        drive_purposing.log
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         ethmixer.log
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         gssd.log
 Fri May  5 00:00:35 2023       41641      hardening.log
 Mon Apr 10 15:31:05 2023       17996      hardening_engine.log
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         hdfs.log
 Fri May  5 15:51:28 2023       31359      hw_ata.log
 Fri May  5 15:51:28 2023       56527      hw_da.log
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         hw_nvd.log
 Mon Apr 10 14:22:18 2023       56         idi.log

In addition to parsing an entire log file with the more and less flags, the isi_log_access utility can also be used to watch (that is, tail) a log. For example, the /var/log/messages log file:

% isi_log_access --watch messages
 2023-05-03T18:00:12.233916-04:00 <1.5> h7001-2(id2) limited[68236]: Called ['/usr/bin/isi_log_access', 'messages'], which returned 2.
 2023-05-03T18:00:23.759198-04:00 <1.5> h7001-2(id2) limited[68236]: Calling ['/usr/bin/isi_log_access'].
 2023-05-03T18:00:23.797928-04:00 <1.5> h7001-2(id2) limited[68236]: Called ['/usr/bin/isi_log_access'], which returned 0.
 2023-05-03T18:00:36.077093-04:00 <1.5> h7001-2(id2) limited[68236]: Calling ['/usr/bin/isi_log_access', '--help'].
 2023-05-03T18:00:36.119688-04:00 <1.5> h7001-2(id2) limited[68236]: Called ['/usr/bin/isi_log_access', '--help'], which returned 0.
 2023-05-03T18:02:14.545070-04:00 <1.5> h7001-2(id2) limited[68236]: Command not in list of allowed commands.
 2023-05-03T18:02:50.384665-04:00 <1.5> h7001-2(id2) limited[68594]: Calling ['/usr/bin/isi_log_access', '--list'].
 2023-05-03T18:02:50.440518-04:00 <1.5> h7001-2(id2) limited[68594]: Called ['/usr/bin/isi_log_access', '--list'], which returned 0.
 2023-05-03T18:03:13.362411-04:00 <1.5> h7001-2(id2) limited[68594]: Command not in list of allowed commands.
 2023-05-03T18:03:52.107538-04:00 <1.5> h7001-2(id2) limited[68738]: Calling ['/usr/bin/isi_log_access', '--watch', 'messages'].

As expected, the last few lines of the messages log file are displayed. These log entries include the command audit entries for the usr_admin_secure user running the isi_log_access utility with both the --help, --list, and --watch arguments.

The isi_log_access utility also allows zipped log files to be read (–zview) or searched (–zgrep) without uncompressing them. For example, to find all the usr_admin entries in the zipped vmlog.0.gz file:

# isi_log_access --zgrep usr_admin vmlog.0.gz
0.0 64468 usr_admin_restricted /usr/local/bin/zsh 
    0.0 64346 usr_admin_restricted python /usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py (python3.8)
    0.0 64468 usr_admin_restricted /usr/local/bin/zsh
    0.0 64346 usr_admin_restricted python /usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py (python3.8)
    0.0 64342 usr_admin_restricted sshd: usr_admin_restricted@pts/3 (sshd)
    0.0 64331 root               sshd: usr_admin_restricted [priv] (sshd)
    0.0 64468 usr_admin_restricted /usr/local/bin/zsh
    0.0 64346 usr_admin_restricted python /usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py (python3.8)
    0.0 64342 usr_admin_restricted sshd: usr_admin_restricted@pts/3 (sshd)
    0.0 64331 root               sshd: usr_admin_restricted [priv] (sshd)
    0.0 64468 usr_admin_restricted /usr/local/bin/zsh
    0.0 64346 usr_admin_restricted python /usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py (python3.8)
    0.0 64342 usr_admin_restricted sshd: usr_admin_restricted@pts/3 (sshd)
    0.0 64331 root               sshd: usr_admin_restricted [priv] (sshd)
    0.0 64468 usr_admin_restricted /usr/local/bin/zsh
    0.0 64346 usr_admin_restricted python /usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py (python3.8)
    0.0 64342 usr_admin_restricted sshd: u_admin_restricted@pts/3 (sshd)
    0.0 64331 root               sshd: usr_admin_restricted [priv] (sshd)

OneFS recovery shell

The purpose of the recovery shell is to allow a restricted shell user to access a regular UNIX shell and its associated command set, if needed. As such, the recovery shell is primarily designed and intended for reactive cluster recovery operations and other unforeseen support issues. Note that the isi_recovery_shell CLI command can only be run, and the recovery shell entered, from within the restricted shell.

The ISI_PRIV_RECOVERY_SHELL privilege is required for a user to elevate their shell from restricted to recovery. The following syntax can be used to add this privilege to a role, in this case the rl_ssh role:

% isi auth roles modify rl_ssh --add-priv=ISI_PRIV_RECOVERY_SHELL
% isi auth roles view rl_ssh
        Name: rl_ssh
 Description: -
     Members: usr_ssh_restricted
              usr_admin_restricted
  Privileges
              ID: ISI_PRIV_LOGIN_SSH
      Permission: r
             ID: ISI_PRIV_SYS_SUPPORT
      Permission: r
             ID: ISI_PRIV_RECOVERY_SHELL
      Permission: r

However, note that the –-restricted-shell-enabled security parameter must be set to true before a user with the ISI_PRIV_RECOVERY_SHELL privilege can enter the recovery shell. For example:

% isi security settings view | grep -i restr
Restricted shell Enabled: No
% isi security settings modify –restricted-shell-enabled=true
% isi security settings view | grep -i restr
Restricted shell Enabled: Yes

The restricted shell user must enter the cluster’s root password to successfully enter the recovery shell. For example:

% isi_recovery_shell -h
 Description:
         This command is used to enter the Recovery shell i.e. normal zsh shell from the PowerScale Restricted shell. This command is supported only in the PowerScale Restricted shell.
Required Privilege:
         ISI_PRIV_RECOVERY_SHELL
Usage:
         isi_recovery_shell
            [{--help | -h}]

If the root password is entered incorrectly, the following error is displayed:

% isi_recovery_shell
 Enter 'root' credentials to enter the Recovery shell
 Password:
 Invalid credentials.
 isi_recovery_shell: PAM Auth Failed

A successful recovery shell launch is as follows:

$ ssh u_admin_restricted@10.246.178.121
 (u_admin_restricted@10.246.178.121) Password:
 Last login: Thu May  4 17:26:10 2023 from 10.246.159.107
 Copyright (c) 2001-2023 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved.
 Copyright (c) 1992-2018 The FreeBSD Project.
 Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
         The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
PowerScale OneFS 9.5.0.0
Allowed commands are
         clear ...
         isi ...
         isi_recovery_shell ...
         isi_log_access ...
         exit
         logout
% isi_recovery_shell
 Enter 'root' credentials to enter the Recovery shell
 Password:
 %

At this point, regular shell/UNIX commands (including the vi editor) are available again:

% whoami
 u_admin_restricted
% pwd
 /ifs/home/u_admin_restricted

 % top | head -n 10
 last pid: 65044;  load averages:  0.12,  0.24,  0.29  up 24+04:17:23    18:38:39
 118 processes: 1 running, 117 sleeping
 CPU:  0.1% user,  0.0% nice,  0.9% system,  0.1% interrupt, 98.9% idle
 Mem: 233M Active, 19G Inact, 2152K Laundry, 137G Wired, 60G Buf, 13G Free
 Swap:
   PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    C   TIME    WCPU COMMAND
  3955 root          1 -22  r30    50M    14M select  24 142:28   0.54% isi_drive_d
  5715 root         20  20    0   231M    69M kqread   5  55:53   0.15% isi_stats_d
  3864 root         14  20    0    81M    21M kqread  16 133:02   0.10% isi_mcp

The specifics of the recovery shell (ZSH) for the u_admin_restricted user are reported as follows:

% printenv $SHELL
 _=/usr/bin/printenv
 PAGER=less
 SAVEHIST=2000
 HISTFILE=/ifs/home/u_admin_restricted/.zsh_history
 HISTSIZE=1000
 OLDPWD=/ifs/home/u_admin_restricted
 PWD=/ifs/home/u_admin_restricted
 SHLVL=1
 LOGNAME=u_admin_restricted
 HOME=/ifs/home/u_admin_restricted
 RECOVERY_SHELL=TRUE
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/root/bin

Shell logic conditions and scripts can be run. For example:

% while true; do uptime; sleep 5; done
  5:47PM  up 24 days,  3:26, 5 users, load averages: 0.44, 0.38, 0.34
  5:47PM  up 24 days,  3:26, 5 users, load averages: 0.41, 0.38, 0.34

ISI commands can be run, and cluster management tasks can be performed.

% isi hardening list
 Name  Description                       Status
 ---------------------------------------------------
 STIG  Enable all STIG security settings Not Applied
 ---------------------------------------------------
 Total: 1

For example, creating and deleting a snapshot:

% isi snap snap list
 ID Name Path
 ------------
 ------------
 Total: 0
% isi snap snap create /ifs/data
% isi snap snap list
 ID   Name  Path
 --------------------
 2    s2    /ifs/data
 --------------------
 Total: 1
% isi snap snap delete 2
 Are you sure? (yes/[no]): yes

Sysctls can be read and managed:

% sysctl efs.gmp.group
efs.gmp.group: <10539754> (4) :{ 1:0-14, 2:0-12,14,17, 3-4:0-14, smb: 1-4, nfs: 1-4, all_enabled_protocols: 1-4, isi_cbind_d: 1-4, lsass: 1-4, external_connectivity: 1-4 }

The restricted shell can be disabled:

% isi security settings modify --restricted-shell-enabled=false
% isi security settings view | grep -i restr
 Restricted shell Enabled: No

However, the isi underscore (isi_*) commands, such as isi_for_array, are still not permitted to run:

% /usr/bin/isi_for_array -s uptime
 zsh: permission denied: /usr/bin/isi_for_array
% isi_gather_info
 zsh: permission denied: isi_gather_info
% isi_cstats
 isi_cstats: Syscall ifs_prefetch_lin() failed: Operation not permitted

When finished, the user can either end the session entirely with the logout command or quit the recovery shell through exit and return to the restricted shell:

% exit
Allowed commands are
         clear ...
         isi ...
         isi_recovery_shell ...
         isi_log_access ...
         exit
         logout
 %

 
Author: Nick Trimbee

In contrast to many other storage appliances, PowerScale has always included an extensive, rich, and capable command line, drawing from its FreeBSD heritage. As such, it incorporates a choice of full UNIX shells (that is, ZSH), the ability to script in a variety of languages (Perl, Python, and so on), full data access, a variety of system and network management and monitoring tools, plus the comprehensive OneFS isi command set. However, what is a bonus for usability can also present a risk from a security point of view.

With this in mind, among the bevy of security features that debuted in OneFS 9.5 release is the addition of a restricted shell for the CLI. This shell heavily curtails access to cluster command line utilities, eliminating areas where commands and scripts could be run and files modified maliciously and unaudited.

The new restricted shell can help both public and private sector organizations to meet a variety of regulatory compliance and audit requirements, in addition to reducing the security threat surface when OneFS is administered.

Written in Python, the restricted shell constrains users to a tight subset of the commands available in the regular OneFS command line shells, plus a couple of additional utilities. These include:

For a OneFS CLI command to be audited, its handler needs to call through the platform API (pAPI). This occurs with the regular isi commands but not necessarily with the “isi underscore” commands such as isi_for_array, and so on. While some of these isi_* commands write to log files, there is no uniform or consistent auditing or logging.

On the data access side, /ifs file system auditing works through the various OneFS protocol heads (NFS, SMB, S3, and so on). So if the CLI is used with an unrestricted shell to directly access and modify /ifs, any access and changes are unrecorded and unaudited.

In OneFS 9.5, the new restricted shell is included in the permitted shells list (/etc/shells):

# grep -i restr /etc/shells
/usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py

It can be easily set for a user through the CLI. For example, to configure the admin account to use the restricted shell, instead of its default of ZSH:

# isi auth users view admin | grep -i shell
                   Shell: /usr/local/bin/zsh
# isi auth users modify admin --shell=/usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py
# isi auth users view admin | grep -i shell
                   Shell: /usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py

OneFS can also be configured to limit non-root users to just the secure shell:

  Restricted shell Enabled: No
# isi security settings modify --restricted-shell-enabled=true
# isi security settings view | grep -i restr
  Restricted shell Enabled: Yes

The underlying configuration changes to support this include only allowing non-root users with approved shells in /etc/shells to log in through the console or SSH and having just /usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py in the /etc/shells config file.

Note that no users’ shells are changed when the configuration commands above are enacted. If users are intended to have shell access, their login shell must be changed before they can log in. Users will also require the privileges ISI_PRIV_LOGIN_SSH and/or ISI_PRIV_LOGIN_CONSOLE to be able to log in through SSH and the console, respectively.

While the WebUI in OneFS 9.5 does not provide a secure shell configuration page, the restricted shell can be enabled from the platform API, in addition to the CLI. The pAPI security settings now include a restricted_shell_enabled key, which can be enabled by setting to value=1, from its default of 0.

Be aware that, upon configuring a OneFS 9.5 cluster to run in hardened mode with the STIG profile (that is, isi hardening enable STIG), the restricted-shell-enable security setting is automatically set to true. This means that only root and users with ISI_PRIV_LOGIN_SSH and/or ISI_PRIV_LOGIN_CONSOLE privileges and the restricted shell as their shell will be permitted to log in to the cluster. We will focus on OneFS security hardening in a future article.

So let’s take a look at some examples of the restricted shell’s configuration and operation. 

First, we log in as the admin user and modify the file and local auth provider password hash types to the more secure SHA512 from their default value of NTHash:

# ssh 10.244.34.34 -l admin
# isi auth file view System | grep -i hash
     Password Hash Type: NTHash
# isi auth local view System | grep -i hash
      Password Hash Type: NTHash
# isi auth file modify System –-password-hash-type=SHA512
# isi auth local modify System –-password-hash-type=SHA512

Note that a cluster’s default user admin uses role-based access control (RBAC), whereas root does not. As such, the root account should ideally be used as infrequently as possible and, ideally, considered solely as the account of last resort.

Next, the admin and root passwords are changed to generate new passwords using the SHA512 hash:

# isi auth users change-password root
# isi auth users change-password admin

An rl_ssh role is created and the SSH access privilege is added to it:

# isi auth roles create rl_ssh
# isi auth roles modify rl_ssh –-add-priv=ISI_PRIV_LOGIN_SSH

Then a regular user (usr_ssh_restricted) and an admin user (usr_admin_resticted) are created with restricted shell privileges:

# isi auth users create usr_ssh_restricted –-shell=/usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py –-set-password
# isi auth users create usr_admin_restricted –shell=/usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py –-set-password

We then assign roles to the new users. For the restricted SSH user, we add to our newly created rl_ssh role:

# isi auth roles modify rl_ssh –-add-user=usr_ssh_restricted

The admin user is then added to the security admin and the system admin roles:

# isi auth roles modify SecurityAdmin –-add-user=usr_admin_restricted
# isi auth roles modify SystemAdmin –-add-user=usr_admin_restricted

Next, we connect to the cluster through SSH and authenticate as the usr_ssh_restricted user:

$ ssh usr_ssh_restricted@10.246.178.121
 (usr_ssh_restricted@10.246.178.121) Password:
 Copyright (c) 2001-2023 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved.
 Copyright (c) 1992-2018 The FreeBSD Project.
 Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
         The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
 PowerScale OneFS 9.5.0.0
Allowed commands are
         clear ...
         isi ...
         isi_recovery_shell ...
         isi_log_access ...
         exit
         logout
%

This account has no cluster RBAC privileges beyond SSH access so cannot run the various isi commands. For example, attempting to run isi status returns no data and, instead, warns of the need for event, job engine, and statistics privileges:

% isi status
Cluster Name: h7001
 __
 *** Capacity and health information require ***
 ***   the privilege: ISI_PRIV_STATISTICS.   ***
Critical Events:
*** Requires the privilege: ISI_PRIV_EVENT. ***
Cluster Job Status:
 __
*** Requires the privilege: ISI_PRIV_JOB_ENGINE. ***
Allowed commands are
         clear ...
         isi ...
         isi_recovery_shell ...
         isi_log_access ...
         exit
         logout
%

Similarly, standard UNIX shell commands, such as pwd and whoami, are also prohibited:

% pwd
Allowed commands are
        clear ...
        isi ...
        isi_recovery_shell ...
        isi_log_access ...
        exit
        logout
% whoami
Allowed commands are
        clear ...
        isi ...
        isi_recovery_shell ...
        isi_log_access ...
        exit
        logout

Indeed, without additional OneFS RBAC privileges, the only commands the usr_ssh_restricted user can actually run in the restricted shell are clear, exit, and logout:

Note that the restricted shell automatically logs out an inactive session after a short period of inactivity.

Next, we log in in with the usr_admin_restricted account:

$ ssh usr_admin_restricted@10.246.178.121
(usr_admin_restricted@10.246.178.121) Password:
Copyright (c) 2001-2023 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright (c) 1992-2018 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
        The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
PowerScale OneFS 9.5.0.0
Allowed commands are
         clear ...
         isi ...
         isi_recovery_shell ...
         isi_log_access ...
         exit
         logout
 %

The isi commands now work because the user has the SecurityAdmin and SystemAdmin roles and privileges:

% isi auth roles list
Name
---------------
AuditAdmin
BackupAdmin
BasicUserRole
SecurityAdmin
StatisticsAdmin
SystemAdmin
VMwareAdmin
rl_console
rl_ssh
---------------
Total: 9
Allowed commands are
        clear ...
        isi ...
        isi_recovery_shell ...
        isi_log_access ...
        exit
        logout
% isi auth users view usr_admin_restricted
                    Name: usr_admin_restricted
                      DN: CN=usr_admin_restricted,CN=Users,DC=H7001
              DNS Domain: -
                  Domain: H7001
                Provider: lsa-local-provider:System
        Sam Account Name: usr_admin_restricted
                     UID: 2003
                     SID: S-1-5-21-3745626141-289409179-1286507423-1003
                 Enabled: Yes
                 Expired: No
                   Expiry: -
                  Locked: No
                   Email: -
                   GECOS: -
           Generated GID: No
           Generated UID: No
           Generated UPN: Yes
           Primary Group
                          ID: GID:1800
                        Name: Isilon Users
          Home Directory: /ifs/home/usr_admin_restricted
        Max Password Age: 4W
        Password Expired: No
         Password Expiry: 2023-05-30T17:16:53
       Password Last Set: 2023-05-02T17:16:53
        Password Expires: Yes
              Last Logon: -
                   Shell: /usr/local/restricted_shell/bin/restricted_shell.py
                     UPN: usr_admin_restricted@H7001
User Can Change Password: Yes
   Disable When Inactive: No
Allowed commands are
        clear ...
        isi ...
        isi_recovery_shell ...
        isi_log_access ...
        exit
        logout
%

However, the OneFS “isi underscore” commands are not supported under the restricted shell. For example, attempting to use the isi_for_array command:

% isi_for_array -s uname -a
Allowed commands are
        clear ...
        isi ...
        isi_recovery_shell ...
        isi_log_access ...
        exit
        logout

Note that, by default, the SecurityAdmin and SystemAdmin roles do not grant the usr_admin_restricted user the privileges needed to run the new isi_log_access and isi_recovery_shell commands.

In the next article in this series, we’ll take a look at these associated isi_log_access and isi_recovery_shell utilities that are also introduced in OneFS 9.5.

Author: Nick Trimbee

In the final blog in this series, we’ll focus on step five of the OneFS firewall provisioning process and turn our attention to some of the management and monitoring considerations and troubleshooting tools associated with the firewall.

One can manage and monitor the firewall in OneFS 9.5 using the CLI, platform API, or WebUI. Because data security threats come from inside an environment as well as out, such as from a rogue IT employee, a good practice is to constrain the use of all-powerful ‘root’, ‘administrator’, and ‘sudo’ accounts as much as possible. Instead of granting cluster admins full rights, a preferred approach is to use OneFS’ comprehensive authentication, authorization, and accounting framework.

OneFS role-based access control (RBAC) can be used to explicitly limit who has access to configure and monitor the firewall. A cluster security administrator selects the desired access zone, creates a zone-aware role within it, assigns privileges, and then assigns members. For example, from the WebUI under Access > Membership and roles > Roles:

When these members login to the cluster from a configuration interface (WebUI, Platform API, or CLI) they inherit their assigned privileges.

Accessing the firewall from the WebUI and CLI in OneFS 9.5 requires the new ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL administration privilege.

# isi auth privileges -v | grep -i -A 2 firewall
         ID: ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL
Description: Configure network firewall
       Name: Firewall
   Category: Configuration
 Permission: w

This privilege can be assigned one of four permission levels for a role, including:

By default, the built-in ‘SystemAdmin’ roles is granted write privileges to administer the firewall, while the built-in ‘AuditAdmin’ role has read permission to view the firewall configuration and logs.

With OneFS RBAC, an enhanced security approach for a site could be to create two additional roles on a cluster, each with an increasing realm of trust. For example:

1.  An IT ops/helpdesk role with ‘read’ access to the snapshot attributes would permit monitoring and troubleshooting the firewall, but no changes:

For example:

# isi auth roles create IT_Ops
# isi auth roles modify IT_Ops --add-priv-read ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL
# isi auth roles view IT_Ops | grep -A2 -i firewall
             ID: ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL
      Permission: r

2.  A Firewall Admin role would provide full firewall configuration and management rights:

For example:

# isi auth roles create FirewallAdmin
# isi auth roles modify FirewallAdmin –add-priv-write ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL
# isi auth roles view FirewallAdmin | grep -A2 -i firewall
ID: ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL
Permission: w

Note that when configuring OneFS RBAC, remember to remove the ‘ISI_PRIV_AUTH’ and ‘ISI_PRIV_ROLE’ privilege from all but the most trusted administrators.

Additionally, enterprise security management tools such as CyberArk can also be incorporated to manage authentication and access control holistically across an environment. These can be configured to change passwords on trusted accounts frequently (every hour or so), require multi-Level approvals prior to retrieving passwords, and track and audit password requests and trends.

OneFS firewall limits

When working with the OneFS firewall, there are some upper bounds to the configurable attributes to keep in mind. These include:

Firewall performance

Be aware that, while the OneFS firewall can greatly enhance the network security of a cluster, by nature of its packet inspection and filtering activity, it does come with a slight performance penalty (generally less than 5%).

Firewall and hardening mode

If OneFS STIG hardening (that is, from ‘isi hardening apply’) is applied to a cluster with the OneFS firewall disabled, the firewall will be automatically activated. On the other hand, if the firewall is already enabled, then there will be no change and it will remain active.

Firewall and user-configurable ports

Some OneFS services allow the TCP/UDP ports on which the daemon listens to be changed. These include:

The default ports for these services are already configured in the associated global policy rules. For example, for the S3 protocol:

# isi network firewall rules list | grep s3
default_pools_policy.rule_s3                  55     Firewall rule on s3 service                                                              allow
# isi network firewall rules view default_pools_policy.rule_s3
          ID: default_pools_policy.rule_s3
        Name: rule_s3
       Index: 55
 Description: Firewall rule on s3 service
    Protocol: TCP
   Dst Ports: 9020, 9021
Src Networks: -
   Src Ports: -
      Action: allow

Note that the global policies, or any custom policies, do not auto-update if these ports are reconfigured. This means that the firewall policies must be manually updated when changing ports. For example, if the NDMP port is changed from 10000 to 10001:

# isi ndmp settings global view
                       Service: False
                           Port: 10000
                            DMA: generic
          Bre Max Num Contexts: 64
MSB Context Retention Duration: 300
MSR Context Retention Duration: 600
        Stub File Open Timeout: 15
             Enable Redirector: False
              Enable Throttler: False
       Throttler CPU Threshold: 50
# isi ndmp settings global modify --port 10001
# isi ndmp settings global view | grep -i port
                           Port: 10001

The firewall’s NDMP rule port configuration must also be reset to 10001:

# isi network firewall rule list | grep ndmp
default_pools_policy.rule_ndmp                44     Firewall rule on ndmp service                                                            allow
# isi network firewall rule modify default_pools_policy.rule_ndmp --dst-ports 10001 --live
# isi network firewall rule view default_pools_policy.rule_ndmp | grep -i dst
   Dst Ports: 10001

Note that the –live flag is specified to enact this port change immediately.

Firewall and source-based routing

Under the hood, OneFS source-based routing (SBR) and the OneFS firewall both leverage ‘ipfw’. As such, SBR and the firewall share the single ipfw table in the kernel. However, the two features use separate ipfw table partitions.

This allows SBR and the firewall to be activated independently of each other. For example, even if the firewall is disabled, SBR can still be enabled and any configured SBR rules displayed as expected (that is, using ipfw set 0 show).

Firewall and IPv6

Note that the firewall’s global default policies have a rule allowing ICMP6 by default. For IPv6 enabled networks, ICMP6 is critical for the functioning of NDP (Neighbor Discovery Protocol). As such, when creating custom firewall policies and rules for IPv6-enabled network subnets/pools, be sure to add a rule allowing ICMP6 to support NDP. As discussed in a previous blog, an alternative (and potentially easier) approach is to clone a global policy to a new one and just customize its ruleset instead.

Firewall and FTP

The OneFS FTP service can work in two modes: Active and Passive. Passive mode is the default, where FTP data connections are created on top of random ephemeral ports. However, because the OneFS firewall requires fixed ports to operate, it only supports the FTP service in Active mode. Attempts to enable the firewall with FTP running in Passive mode will generate the following warning:

# isi ftp settings view | grep -i active
          Active Mode: No
# isi network firewall settings modify --enabled yes
FTP service is running in Passive mode. Enabling network firewall will lead to FTP clients having their connections blocked. To avoid this, please enable FTP active mode and ensure clients are configured in active mode before retrying. Are you sure you want to proceed and enable network firewall? (yes/[no]):

To activate the OneFS firewall in conjunction with the FTP service, first ensure that the FTP service is running in Active mode before enabling the firewall. For example:

# isi ftp settings view | grep -i enable
  FTP Service Enabled: Yes
# isi ftp settings view | grep -i active
          Active Mode: No
# isi ftp setting modify –active-mode true
# isi ftp settings view | grep -i active
          Active Mode: Yes
# isi network firewall settings modify --enabled yes

Note: Verify FTP active mode support and/or firewall settings on the client side, too.

Firewall monitoring and troubleshooting

When it comes to monitoring the OneFS firewall, the following logfiles and utilities provide a variety of information and are a good source to start investigating an issue:

Note that the preceding files and command output are automatically included in logsets generated by the ‘isi_gather_info’ data collection tool.

You can run the isi_gconfig command with the ‘-q’ flag to identify any values that are not at their default settings. For example, the stock (default) isi_firewall_d gconfig context will not report any configuration entries:

# isi_gconfig -q -t firewall
[root] {version:1}

The firewall can also be run in the foreground for additional active rule reporting and debug output. For example, first shut down the isi_firewall_d service:

# isi services -a isi_firewall_d disable
The service 'isi_firewall_d' has been disabled.

Next, start up the firewall with the ‘-f’ flag.

# isi_firewall_d -f
Acquiring kevents for flxconfig
Acquiring kevents for nodeinfo
Acquiring kevents for firewall config
Initialize the firewall library
Initialize the ipfw set
ipfw: Rule added by ipfw is for temporary use and will be auto flushed soon. Use isi firewall instead.
cmd:/sbin/ipfw set enable 0 normal termination, exit code:0
isi_firewall_d is now running
Loaded master FlexNet config (rev:312)
Update the local firewall with changed files: flx_config, Node info, Firewall config
Start to update the firewall rule...
flx_config version changed!                              latest_flx_config_revision: new:312, orig:0
node_info version changed!                               latest_node_info_revision: new:1, orig:0
firewall gconfig version changed!                                latest_fw_gconfig_revision: new:17, orig:0
Start to update the firewall rule for firewall configuration (gconfig)
Start to handle the firewall configure (gconfig)
Handle the firewall policy default_pools_policy
ipfw: Rule added by ipfw is for temporary use and will be auto flushed soon. Use isi firewall instead.
32043 allow tcp from any to any 10000 in
cmd:/sbin/ipfw add 32043 set 8 allow TCP from any  to any 10000 in  normal termination, exit code:0
ipfw: Rule added by ipfw is for temporary use and will be auto flushed soon. Use isi firewall instead.
32044 allow tcp from any to any 389,636 in
cmd:/sbin/ipfw add 32044 set 8 allow TCP from any  to any 389,636 in  normal termination, exit code:0
Snip...

If the OneFS firewall is enabled and some network traffic is blocked, either this or the ipfw show CLI command will often provide the first clues.

Please note that the ipfw command should NEVER be used to modify the OneFS firewall table!

For example, say a rule is added to the default pools policy denying traffic on port 9876 from all source networks (0.0.0.0/0):

# isi network firewall rules create default_pools_policy.rule_9876 --index=100 --dst-ports 9876 --src-networks 0.0.0.0/0 --action deny –live
# isi network firewall rules view default_pools_policy.rule_9876
          ID: default_pools_policy.rule_9876
        Name: rule_9876
       Index: 100
 Description:
    Protocol: ALL
   Dst Ports: 9876
Src Networks: 0.0.0.0/0
   Src Ports: -
      Action: deny

Running ipfw show and grepping for the port will show this new rule:

# ipfw show | grep 9876
32099            0               0 deny ip from any to any 9876 in

The ipfw show command output also reports the statistics of how many IP packets have matched each rule This can be incredibly useful when investigating firewall issues. For example, a telnet session is initiated to the cluster on port 9876 from a client:

# telnet 10.224.127.8 9876
Trying 10.224.127.8...
telnet: connect to address 10.224.127.8: Operation timed out
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host

The connection attempt will time out because the port 9876 ‘deny’ rule will silently drop the packets. At the same time, the ipfw show command will increment its counter to report on the denied packets. For example:

# ipfw show | grep 9876
32099            9             540 deny ip from any to any 9876 in

If this behavior is not anticipated or desired, you can find the rule name by searching the rules list for the port number, in this case port 9876:

# isi network firewall rules list | grep 9876
default_pools_policy.rule_9876                100                                                                 deny

The offending rule can then be reverted to ‘allow’ traffic on port 9876:

# isi network firewall rules modify default_pools_policy.rule_9876 --action allow --live

Or easily deleted, if preferred:

# isi network firewall rules delete default_pools_policy.rule_9876 --live
Are you sure you want to delete firewall rule default_pools_policy.rule_9876? (yes/[no]): yes

Author: Nick Trimbee

PowerScale OneFS 9.6 now brings a new offering in AWS cloud — APEX File Storage for AWS. APEX File Storage for AWS is a software-defined cloud file storage service that provides high-performance, flexible, secure, and scalable file storage for AWS environments. It is a fully customer managed service that is designed to meet the needs of enterprise-scale file workloads running on AWS.

Benefits of running OneFS in Cloud

APEX File Storage for AWS brings the OneFS distributed file system software into the public cloud, allowing users to have the same management experience in the cloud as with their on-premises PowerScale appliance.

With APEX File Storage for AWS, you can easily deploy and manage file storage on AWS, without the need for hardware or software management. The service provides a scalable and elastic storage infrastructure that can grow or shrink, according to your actual business needs.

Some of the key features and benefits of APEX File Storage for AWS include:

• Scale-out: APEX File Storage for AWS is powered by the Dell PowerScale OneFS distributed file system. You can start with a small OneFS cluster and then expand it incrementally as your data storage requirements grow. Cluster capacity can be scaled on-demand up to 1PiB. 
• Data management: APEX File Storage for AWS provides powerful data management capabilities, such as snapshot, data replication, and backup and restore. Because OneFS features are the same in the cloud as in on-premises, organizations can simplify operations and reduce management complexity with a consistent user experience.
• Simplified journey to hybrid cloud: More and more organizations operate in a hybrid cloud environment, where they need to move data between on-premises and cloud-based environments. APEX File Storage for AWS can help you bridge this gap by facilitating seamless data mobility between on-premises and the cloud with native replication and by providing a consistent data management platform across both environments. Once in the cloud, customers can take advantage of enterprise-class OneFS features such as multi-protocol support, CloudPools, data reduction, and snapshots, to run their workloads in the same way as they do on-premises. APEX File Storage for AWS can use CloudPools to tier cold or infrequently accessed data to lower cost cloud storage, such as AWS S3 object storage. CloudPools extends the OneFS namespace to the private/public cloud and allows you to store much more data than the usable cluster capacity.
• High performance: APEX File Storage for AWS delivers high-performance file storage with low-latency access to data, ensuring that you can access data quickly and efficiently.

Architecture

The architecture of APEX File Storage for AWS is based on the OneFS distributed file system, which consists of multiple cluster nodes to provide a single global namespace. Each cluster node is an instance of OneFS software that runs on an AWS EC2 instance and provides storage capacity and compute resources. The following diagram shows the architecture of APEX File Storage for AWS.

• Availability zone: APEX File Storage for AWS is designed to run in a single AWS availability zone to get the best performance.
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): APEX File Storage for AWS requires an AWS VPC to provide network connectivity.
• OneFS cluster internal subnet: The cluster nodes communicate with each other through the internal subnet. The internal subnet must be isolated from instances that are not in the cluster. Therefore, a dedicated subnet is required for the internal network interfaces of cluster nodes that do not share internal subnets with other EC2 instances.
• OneFS cluster external subnet: The cluster nodes communicate with clients through the external subnet by using different protocols, such as NFS, SMB, and S3.
• OneFS cluster internal network interfaces: Network interfaces that are located in the internal subnet.
• OneFS cluster external network interfaces: Network interfaces that are located in the external subnet.
• OneFS cluster internal security group: The security group applies to the cluster internal network interfaces and allows all traffic between the cluster nodes’ internal network interfaces only.
• OneFS cluster external security group: The security group applies to cluster external network interfaces and allows specific ingress traffic from clients.
• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance nodes: Cluster nodes that run the OneFS filesystem backed by Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes and that provide network bandwidth.

 

Supported cluster configuration

APEX File Storage for AWS provides two types of cluster configurations:

• Solid State Drive (SSD) cluster: APEX File Storage for AWS supports clusters backed by General Purpose SSD (gp3) EBS volumes with up to 1PiB cluster raw capacity. The gp3 EBS volumes are the latest generation of General Purpose SSD volumes, and the lowest cost SSD volume offered by AWS EBS. They balance price and performance for a wide variety of workloads.

• Hard Disk Drive (HDD) cluster: APEX File Storage for AWS supports clusters backed by Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) EBS volumes with up to 360TiB cluster raw capacity. The st1 EBS volumes provide low-cost magnetic storage that defines performance in terms of throughput rather than IOPS. This volume type is a good fit for large sequential workloads.

APEX File Storage for AWS can deliver 10GB/s seq read and 4GB/s seq write performance as the cluster size grows. To learn more details about APEX File Storage for AWS, see the following documentation.

• APEX File Storage for AWS Deployment Guide
• Introduction to APEX File Storage for AWS
• Interactive Demo

Author: Lieven Lin

In the previous article in this OneFS firewall series, we reviewed the upgrade, activation, and policy selection components of the firewall provisioning process.

Now, we turn our attention to the firewall rule configuration step of the process.

As stated previously, role-based access control (RBAC) explicitly limits who has access to manage the OneFS firewall. So, ensure that the user account that will be used to enable and configure the OneFS firewall belongs to a role with the ‘ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL’ write privilege.

4. Configuring Firewall Rules

When the desired policy is created, the next step is to configure the rules. Clearly, the first step here is to decide which ports and services need securing or opening, beyond the defaults.

The following CLI syntax returns a list of all the firewall’s default services, plus their respective ports, protocols, and aliases, sorted by ascending port number:

# isi network firewall services list
 
Service Name     Port  Protocol   Aliases
 
---------------------------------------------
 
ftp-data         20    TCP        -
 
ftp              21    TCP        -
 
ssh              22    TCP        -
 
smtp             25    TCP        -
 
dns              53    TCP        domain
 
                       UDP
 
http             80    TCP        www
 
                                  www-http
 
kerberos         88    TCP        kerberos-sec
 
                       UDP
 
rpcbind          111   TCP        portmapper
 
                        UDP       sunrpc
 
                                 rpc.bind
 
ntp              123   UDP        -
 
dcerpc           135   TCP        epmap
 
                        UDP       loc-srv
 
netbios-ns       137   UDP        -
 
netbios-dgm      138   UDP        -
 
netbios-ssn      139   UDP        -
 
snmp             161   UDP        -
 
snmptrap         162   UDP        snmp-trap
 
mountd           300   TCP        nfsmountd
 
                       UDP
 
statd            302   TCP        nfsstatd
 
                       UDP
 
lockd            304   TCP       nfslockd
 
                       UDP
 
nfsrquotad       305   TCP        -
 
                       UDP
 
nfsmgmtd         306   TCP        -
 
                       UDP
 
ldap             389   TCP        -
 
                       UDP
 
https            443   TCP        -
 
smb              445   TCP        microsoft-ds
 
hdfs-datanode    585   TCP        -
 
asf-rmcp         623   TCP        -
 
                       UDP
 
ldaps            636   TCP        sldap
 
asf-secure-rmcp  664   TCP        -
 
                       UDP
 
ftps-data        989   TCP        -
 
ftps             990   TCP        -
 
nfs              2049  TCP        nfsd
 
                       UDP
 
tcp-2097         2097  TCP        -
 
tcp-2098         2098  TCP        -
 
tcp-3148         3148  TCP        -
 
tcp-3149         3149  TCP        -
 
tcp-3268         3268  TCP        -
 
tcp-3269         3269  TCP        -
 
tcp-5667         5667  TCP        -
 
tcp-5668         5668  TCP        -
 
isi_ph_rpcd      6557  TCP        -
 
isi_dm_d         7722  TCP        -
 
hdfs-namenode    8020  TCP        -
 
isi_webui        8080  TCP        apache2
 
webhdfs          8082  TCP        -
 
tcp-8083         8083  TCP        -
 
ambari-handshake 8440   TCP       -
 
ambari-heartbeat 8441   TCP       -
 
tcp-8443         8443  TCP        -
 
tcp-8470         8470  TCP        -
 
s3-http          9020  TCP        -
 
s3-https         9021  TCP        -
 
isi_esrs_d       9443  TCP        -
 
ndmp             10000 TCP       -
 
cee              12228 TCP       -
 
nfsrdma          20049 TCP       -
 
                       UDP
 
tcp-28080        28080 TCP       -
 
---------------------------------------------
 
Total: 55

Similarly, the following CLI command generates a list of existing rules and their associated policies, sorted in alphabetical order. For example, to show the first five rules:

# isi network firewall rules list –-limit 5
 
ID                                             Index  Description                                                                              Action
 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
default_pools_policy.rule_ambari_handshake    41      Firewall rule on ambari-handshake service                                                allow
 
default_pools_policy.rule_ambari_heartbeat    42      Firewall rule on ambari-heartbeat service                                               allow
 
default_pools_policy.rule_catalog_search_req  50      Firewall rule on service for global catalog search requests                             allow
 
default_pools_policy.rule_cee                 52     Firewall rule on cee service                                                             allow
 
default_pools_policy.rule_dcerpc_tcp          18      Firewall rule on dcerpc(TCP) service                                                     allow
 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Total: 5

Both the ‘isi network firewall rules list’ and the ‘isi network firewall services list’ commands also have a ‘-v’ verbose option, and can return their output in csv, list, table, or json formats with the ‘–flag’.

To view the detailed info for a given firewall rule, in this case the default SMB rule, use the following CLI syntax:

# isi network firewall rules view default_pools_policy.rule_smb
 
          ID: default_pools_policy.rule_smb
 
        Name: rule_smb
 
       Index: 3
 
 Description: Firewall rule on smb service
 
    Protocol: TCP
 
   Dst Ports: smb
 
Src Networks: -
 
   Src Ports: -
 
      Action: allow

Existing rules can be modified and new rules created and added into an existing firewall policy with the ‘isi network firewall rules create’ CLI syntax. Command options include:

Note that, unlike for firewall policies, there is no provision for cloning individual rules.

The following CLI syntax can be used to create new firewall rules. For example, to add ‘allow’ rules for the HTTP and SSH protocols, plus a ‘deny’ rule for port TCP 9876, into firewall policy fw_test1:

# isi network firewall rules create  fw_test1.rule_http  --index 1 --dst-ports http --src-networks 10.20.30.0/24,20.30.40.0/24 --action allow
# isi network firewall rules create  fw_test1.rule_ssh  --index 2 --dst-ports ssh --src-networks 10.20.30.0/24,20.30.40.0/16 --action allow
# isi network firewall rules create fw_test1.rule_tcp_9876 --index 3 --protocol tcp --dst-ports 9876   --src-networks 10.20.30.0/24,20.30.40.0/24 -- action deny

When a new rule is created in a policy, if the index value is not specified, it will automatically inherit the next available number in the series (such as index=4 in this case).

# isi network firewall rules create fw_test1.rule_2049  --protocol udp -dst-ports 2049 --src-networks 30.1.0.0/16 -- action deny

For a more draconian approach, a ‘deny’ rule could be created using the match-everything ‘*’ wildcard for destination ports and a 0.0.0.0/0 network and mask, which would silently drop all traffic:

# isi network firewall rules create fw_test1.rule_1234  --index=100--dst-ports * --src-networks 0.0.0.0/0 --action deny

When modifying existing firewall rules, use the following CLI syntax, in this case to change the source network of an HTTP allow rule (index 1) in firewall policy fw_test1:

# isi network firewall rules modify fw_test1.rule_http --index 1  --protocol ip --dst-ports http --src-networks 10.1.0.0/16 -- action allow

Or to modify an SSH rule (index 2) in firewall policy fw_test1, changing the action from ‘allow’ to ‘deny’:

# isi network firewall rules modify fw_test1.rule_ssh --index 2 --protocol tcp --dst-ports ssh --src-networks 10.1.0.0/16,20.2.0.0/16 -- action deny

Also, to re-order the custom TCP 9876 rule form the earlier example from index 3 to index 7 in firewall policy fw_test1.

# isi network firewall rules modify fw_test1.rule_tcp_9876 --index 7

Note that all rules equal or behind index 7 will have their index values incremented by one.

When deleting a rule from a firewall policy, any rule reordering is handled automatically. If the policy has been applied to a network pool, the ‘–live’ option can be used to force the change to take effect immediately. For example, to delete the HTTP rule from the firewall policy ‘fw_test1’:

# isi network firewall policies delete fw_test1.rule_http --live

Firewall rules can also be created, modified, and deleted within a policy from the WebUI by navigating to Cluster management > Firewall Configuration > Firewall Policies. For example, to create a rule that permits SupportAssist and Secure Gateway traffic on the 10.219.0.0/16 network:

Once saved, the new rule is then displayed in the Firewall Configuration page:

5. Firewall management and monitoring.

In the next and final article in this series, we’ll turn our attention to managing, monitoring, and troubleshooting the OneFS firewall (Step 5).

Author: Nick Trimbee

The new firewall in OneFS 9.5 enhances the security of the cluster and helps prevent unauthorized access to the storage system. When enabled, the default firewall configuration allows remote systems access to a specific set of default services for data, management, and inter-cluster interfaces (network pools).

The basic OneFS firewall provisioning process is as follows:

Note that role-based access control (RBAC) explicitly limits who has access to manage the OneFS firewall. In addition to the ubiquitous root, the cluster’s built-in SystemAdmin role has write privileges to configure and administer the firewall.

1.  Upgrade cluster to OneFS 9.5.

First, to provision the firewall, the cluster must be running OneFS 9.5.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release, the OneFS 9.5 upgrade must be committed before enabling the firewall.

Also, be aware that configuration and management of the firewall in OneFS 9.5 requires the new ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL administration privilege. 

# isi auth privilege | grep -i firewall
ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL                   Configure network firewall

This privilege can be granted to a role with either read-only or read/write permissions. By default, the built-in SystemAdmin role is granted write privileges to administer the firewall:

# isi auth roles view SystemAdmin | grep -A2 -i firewall
             ID: ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL
     Permission: w

Additionally, the built-in AuditAdmin role has read permission to view the firewall configuration and logs, and so on:

# isi auth roles view AuditAdmin | grep -A2 -i firewall
             ID: ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL
     Permission: r

Ensure that the user account that will be used to enable and configure the OneFS firewall belongs to a role with the ISI_PRIV_FIREWALL write privilege.

2.  Activate firewall.

The OneFS firewall can be either enabled or disabled, with the latter as the default state. 

The following CLI syntax will display the firewall’s global status (in this case disabled, the default):

# isi network firewall settings view
Enabled: False

Firewall activation can be easily performed from the CLI as follows:

# isi network firewall settings modify --enabled true
# isi network firewall settings view
Enabled: True

Or from the WebUI under Cluster management > Firewall Configuration > Settings:

Note that the firewall is automatically enabled when STIG hardening is applied to a cluster.

3.  Select policies.

A cluster’s existing firewall policies can be easily viewed from the CLI with the following command:

# isi network firewall policies list
ID        Pools                    Subnets                   Rules
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 fw_test1  groupnet0.subnet0.pool0  groupnet0.subnet1         test_rule1
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Total: 1

Or from the WebUI under Cluster management > Firewall Configuration > Firewall Policies:

The OneFS firewall offers four main strategies when it comes to selecting a firewall policy: 

1. Retaining the default policy
2. Reconfiguring the default policy
3. Cloning the default policy and reconfiguring
4. Creating a custom firewall policy

We’ll consider each of these strategies in order:

a.  Retaining the default policy

In many cases, the default OneFS firewall policy value provides acceptable protection for a security-conscious organization. In these instances, once the OneFS firewall has been enabled on a cluster, no further configuration is required, and the cluster administrators can move on to the management and monitoring phase.

The firewall policy for all front-end cluster interfaces (network pool) is the default. While the default policy can be modified, be aware that this default policy is global. As such, any change against it will affect all network pools using this default policy.

The following table describes the default firewall policies that are assigned to each interface:

These can be viewed from the CLI as follows:

# isi network firewall policies view default_pools_policy
            ID: default_pools_policy
          Name: default_pools_policy
    Description: Default Firewall Pools Policy
Default Action: deny
      Max Rules: 100
          Pools: groupnet0.subnet0.pool0, groupnet0.subnet0.testpool1, groupnet0.subnet0.testpool2, groupnet0.subnet0.testpool3, groupnet0.subnet0.testpool4, groupnet0.subnet0.poolcava
        Subnets: -
          Rules: rule_ldap_tcp, rule_ldap_udp, rule_reserved_for_hw_tcp, rule_reserved_for_hw_udp, rule_isi_SyncIQ, rule_catalog_search_req, rule_lwswift, rule_session_transfer, rule_s3, rule_nfs_tcp, rule_nfs_udp, rule_smb, rule_hdfs_datanode, rule_nfsrdma_tcp, rule_nfsrdma_udp, rule_ftp_data, rule_ftps_data, rule_ftp, rule_ssh, rule_smtp, rule_http, rule_kerberos_tcp, rule_kerberos_udp, rule_rpcbind_tcp, rule_rpcbind_udp, rule_ntp, rule_dcerpc_tcp, rule_dcerpc_udp, rule_netbios_ns, rule_netbios_dgm, rule_netbios_ssn, rule_snmp, rule_snmptrap, rule_mountd_tcp, rule_mountd_udp, rule_statd_tcp, rule_statd_udp, rule_lockd_tcp, rule_lockd_udp, rule_nfsrquotad_tcp, rule_nfsrquotad_udp, rule_nfsmgmtd_tcp, rule_nfsmgmtd_udp, rule_https, rule_ldaps, rule_ftps, rule_hdfs_namenode, rule_isi_webui, rule_webhdfs, rule_ambari_handshake, rule_ambari_heartbeat, rule_isi_esrs_d, rule_ndmp, rule_isi_ph_rpcd, rule_cee, rule_icmp, rule_icmp6, rule_isi_dm_d

 # isi network firewall policies view default_subnets_policy
            ID: default_subnets_policy
          Name: default_subnets_policy
    Description: Default Firewall Subnets Policy
Default Action: deny
      Max Rules: 100
          Pools: -
        Subnets: groupnet0.subnet0
          Rules: rule_subnets_dns_tcp, rule_subnets_dns_udp, rule_icmp, rule_icmp6

Or from the WebUI under Cluster management > Firewall Configuration > Firewall Policies:

b.  Reconfiguring the default policy

Depending on an organization’s threat levels or security mandates, there may be a need to restrict access to certain additional IP addresses and/or management service protocols.

If the default policy is deemed insufficient, reconfiguring the default firewall policy can be a good option if only a small number of rule changes are required. The specifics of creating, modifying, and deleting individual firewall rules is covered later in this article (step 3).

Note that if new rule changes behave unexpectedly, or firewall configuration generally goes awry, OneFS does provide a “get out of jail free” card. In a pinch, the global firewall policy can be quickly and easily restored to its default values. This can be achieved with the following CLI syntax:

# isi network firewall reset-global-policy

This command will reset the global firewall policies to the original system defaults. Are you sure you want to continue? (yes/[no]):

Alternatively, the default policy can also be easily reverted from the WebUI by clicking the Reset default policies:

 c.  Cloning the default policy and reconfiguring

Another option is cloning, which can be useful when batch modification or a large number of changes to the current policy are required. By cloning the default firewall policy, an exact copy of the existing policy and its rules is generated, but with a new policy name. For example:

# isi network firewall policies clone default_pools_policy clone_default_pools_policy
# isi network firewall policies list | grep -i clone
clone_default_pools_policy -                           

Cloning can also be initiated from the WebUI under Firewall Configuration > Firewall Policies > More Actions > Clone Policy:

Enter a name for the clone in the Policy Name field in the pop-up window, and click Save:

 Once cloned, the policy can then be easily reconfigured to suit. For example, to modify the policy fw_test1 and change its default-action from deny-all to allow-all:

# isi network firewall policies modify fw_test1 --default-action allow-all

When modifying a firewall policy, you can use the --live CLI option to force it to take effect immediately. Note that the --live option is only valid when issuing a command to modify or delete an active custom policy and to modify default policy. Such changes will take effect immediately on all network subnets and pools associated with this policy. Using the --live option on an inactive policy will be rejected, and an error message returned.

Options for creating or modifying a firewall policy include:

When you modify firewall policies, OneFS issues the following warning to verify the changes and help avoid the risk of a self-induced denial-of-service:   

# isi network firewall policies modify --pools groupnet0.subnet0.pool0 fw_test1

Changing the Firewall Policy associated with a subnet or pool may change the networks and/or services allowed to connect to OneFS. Please confirm you have selected the correct Firewall Policy and Subnets/Pools. Are you sure you want to continue? (yes/[no]): yes

Once again, having the following CLI command handy, plus console access to the cluster is always a prudent move:

# isi network firewall reset-global-policy

So adding network pools or subnets to a firewall policy will cause the previous policy to be removed from them. Similarly, adding network pools or subnets to the global default policy will revert any custom policy configuration they might have. For example, to apply the firewall policy fw_test1 to IP Pool groupnet0.subnet0.pool0 and groupnet0.subnet0.pool1:

# isi network pools view groupnet0.subnet0.pool0 | grep -i firewall
       Firewall Policy: default_pools_policy
# isi network firewall policies modify fw_test1 --add-pools groupnet0.subnet0.pool0, groupnet0.subnet0.pool1
# isi network pools view groupnet0.subnet0.pool0 | grep -i firewall
       Firewall Policy: fw_test1

Or to apply the firewall policy fw_test1 to IP Pool groupnet0.subnet0.pool0 and groupnet0.subnet0:

# isi network firewall policies modify fw_test1 --apply-subnet groupnet0.subnet0.pool0, groupnet0.subnet0
# isi network pools view groupnet0.subnet0.pool0 | grep -i firewall
 Firewall Policy: fw_test1
# isi network subnets view groupnet0.subnet0 | grep -i firewall
 Firewall Policy: fw_test1

To reapply global policy at any time, either add the pools to the default policy:

# isi network firewall policies modify default_pools_policy --add-pools groupnet0.subnet0.pool0, groupnet0.subnet0.pool1
# isi network pools view groupnet0.subnet0.pool0 | grep -i firewall
 Firewall Policy: default_subnets_policy
# isi network subnets view groupnet0.subnet1 | grep -i firewall
 Firewall Policy: default_subnets_policy

Or remove the pool from the custom policy:

# isi network firewall policies modify fw_test1 --remove-pools groupnet0.subnet0.pool0 groupnet0.subnet0.pool1

You can also manage firewall policies on a network pool in the OneFS WebUI by going to Cluster configuration > Network configuration > External network > Edit pool details. For example:

Be aware that cloning is also not limited to the default policy because clones can be made of any custom policies too. For example:

# isi network firewall policies clone clone_default_pools_policy fw_test1

d.  Creating a custom firewall policy

Alternatively, a custom firewall policy can also be created from scratch. This can be accomplished from the CLI using the following syntax, in this case to create a firewall policy named fw_test1:

# isi network firewall policies create fw_test1 --default-action deny
# isi network firewall policies view fw_test1
            ID: fw_test1
          Name: fw_test1
    Description:
Default Action: deny
      Max Rules: 100
          Pools: -
        Subnets: -
          Rules: -

Note that if a default-action is not specified in the CLI command syntax, it will automatically default to deny.

Firewall policies can also be configured in the OneFS WebUI by going to Cluster management > Firewall Configuration > Firewall Policies > Create Policy:

However, in contrast to the CLI, if a default-action is not specified when a policy is created in the WebUI, the automatic default is to Allow because the drop-down list works alphabetically.

If and when a firewall policy is no longer required, it can be swiftly and easily removed. For example, the following CLI syntax deletes the firewall policy fw_test1, clearing out any rules within this policy container:

# isi network firewall policies delete fw_test1
Are you sure you want to delete firewall policy fw_test1? (yes/[no]): yes

Note that the default global policies cannot be deleted.

# isi network firewall policies delete default_subnets_policy
Are you sure you want to delete firewall policy default_subnets_policy? (yes/[no]): yes
Firewall policy: Cannot delete default policy default_subnets_policy.

4.  Configure firewall rules.

 In the next article in this series, we’ll turn our attention to this step, configuring the OneFS firewall rules.

Among the array of security features introduced in OneFS 9.5 is a new host-based firewall. This firewall allows cluster administrators to configure policies and rules on a PowerScale cluster in order to meet the network and application management needs and security mandates of an organization.

The OneFS firewall protects the cluster’s external, or front-end, network and operates as a packet filter for inbound traffic. It is available upon installation or upgrade to OneFS 9.5 but is disabled by default in both cases. However, the OneFS STIG hardening profile automatically enables the firewall and the default policies, in addition to manual activation.

The firewall generally manages IP packet filtering in accordance with the OneFS Security Configuration Guide, especially in regards to the network port usage. Packet control is governed by firewall policies, which have one or more individual rules.

 A security best practice is to enable the OneFS firewall using the default policies, with any adjustments as required. The recommended configuration process is as follows:

Under the hood, the OneFS firewall is built upon the ubiquitous ipfirewall, or ipfw, which is FreeBSD’s native stateful firewall, packet filter, and traffic accounting facility.

Firewall configuration and management is through the CLI, or platform API, or WebUI, and OneFS 9.5 introduces a new Firewall Configuration page to support this. Note that the firewall is only available once a cluster is already running OneFS 9.5 and the feature has been manually enabled, activating the isi_firewall_d service. The firewall’s configuration is split between gconfig, which handles the settings and policies, and the ipfw table, which stores the rules themselves.

The firewall gracefully handles SmartConnect dynamic IP movement between nodes since firewall policies are applied per network pool. Additionally, being network pool based allows the firewall to support OneFS access zones and shared/multitenancy models. 

The individual firewall rules, which are essentially simplified wrappers around ipfw rules, work by matching packets through the 5-tuples that uniquely identify an IPv4 UDP or TCP session:

• Source IP address
• Source port
• Destination IP address
• Destination port
• Transport protocol

The rules are then organized within a firewall policy, which can be applied to one or more network pools. 

Note that each pool can only have a single firewall policy applied to it. If there is no custom firewall policy configured for a network pool, it automatically uses the global default firewall policy.

When enabled, the OneFS firewall function is cluster wide, and all inbound packets from external interfaces will go through either the custom policy or default global policy before reaching the protocol handling pathways. Packets passed to the firewall are compared against each of the rules in the policy, in rule-number order. Multiple rules with the same number are permitted, in which case they are processed in order of insertion. When a match is found, the action corresponding to that matching rule is performed. A packet is checked against the active ruleset in multiple places in the protocol stack, and the basic flow is as follows: 

1. Get the logical interface for incoming packets.
2. Find all network pools assigned to this interface.
3. Compare these network pools one by one with destination IP address to find the matching pool (either custom firewall policy, or default global policy).
4. Compare each rule with service (protocol and destination ports) and source IP address in this pool in order of lowest index value.  If matched, perform actions according to the associated rule.
5. If no rule matches, go to the final rule (deny all or allow all), which is specified upon policy creation.

The OneFS firewall automatically reserves 20,000 rules in the ipfw table for its custom and default policies and rules. By default, each policy can have a maximum of 100 rules, including one default rule. This translates to an effective maximum of 99 user-defined rules per policy, because the default rule is reserved and cannot be modified. As such, a maximum of 198 policies can be applied to pools or subnets since the default-pools-policy and default-subnets-policy are reserved and cannot be deleted.

Additional firewall bounds and limits to keep in mind include:

The firewall default global policy is ready to use out of the box and, unless a custom policy has been explicitly configured, all network pools use this global policy. Custom policies can be configured by either cloning and modifying an existing policy or creating one from scratch. 

For a given network pool, either the global policy or a custom policy is assigned and takes effect. Additionally, all configuration changes to either policy type are managed by gconfig and are persistent across cluster reboots.

In the next article in this series we’ll take a look at the CLI and WebUI configuration and management of the OneFS firewall. 

In this era of elevated cyber-crime and data security threats, there is increasing demand for immutable, tamper-proof snapshots. Often this need arises as part of a broader security mandate, ideally proactively, but oftentimes as a response to a security incident. OneFS addresses this requirement in the following ways:

Read-only snapshots

At its core, OneFS SnapshotIQ generates read-only, point-in-time, space efficient copies of a defined subset of a cluster’s data.

Only the changed blocks of a file are stored when updating OneFS snapshots, ensuring efficient storage utilization. They are also highly scalable and typically take less than a second to create, while generating little performance overhead. As such, the RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective) of a OneFS snapshot can be very small and highly flexible, with the use of rich policies and schedules.

OneFS Snapshots are created manually, on a schedule, or automatically generated by OneFS to facilitate system operations. But whatever the generation method, when a snapshot has been taken, its contents cannot be manually altered.

Snapshot Locks

In addition to snapshot contents immutability, for an enhanced level of tamper-proofing, SnapshotIQ also provides the ability to lock snapshots with the ‘isi snapshot locks’ CLI syntax. This prevents snapshots from being accidentally or unintentionally deleted.

For example, a manual snapshot, ‘snaploc1’ is taken of /ifs/test:

# isi snapshot snapshots create /ifs/test --name snaploc1
# isi snapshot snapshots list | grep snaploc1
79188 snaploc1                                     /ifs/test

A lock is then placed on it (in this case lock ID=1):

# isi snapshot locks create snaplock1
# isi snapshot locks list snaploc1
ID
----
1
----
Total: 1

Attempts to delete the snapshot fail because the lock prevents its removal:

# isi snapshot snapshots delete snaploc1
Are you sure? (yes/[no]): yes
Snapshot "snaploc1" can't be deleted because it is locked

The CLI command ‘isi snapshot locks delete <lock_ID>’ can be used to clear existing snapshot locks, if desired. For example, to remove the only lock (ID=1) from snapshot ‘snaploc1’:

# isi snapshot locks list snaploc1
ID
----
1
----
Total: 1
# isi snapshot locks delete snaploc1 1
Are you sure you want to delete snapshot lock 1 from snaploc1? (yes/[no]): yes
# isi snap locks view snaploc1 1
No such lock

When the lock is removed, the snapshot can then be deleted:

# isi snapshot snapshots delete snaploc1
Are you sure? (yes/[no]): yes
# isi snapshot snapshots list| grep -i snaploc1 | wc -l
       0

Note that a snapshot can have up to a maximum of sixteen locks on it at any time. Also, lock numbers are continually incremented and not recycled upon deletion.

Like snapshot expiration, snapshot locks can also have an expiration time configured. For example, to set a lock on snapshot ‘snaploc1’ that expires at 1am on April 1st, 2024:

# isi snap lock create snaploc1 --expires '2024-04-01T01:00:00'
# isi snap lock list snaploc1
ID
----
36
----
Total: 1
# isi snap lock view snaploc1 33
     ID: 36
Comment:
Expires: 2024-04-01T01:00:00
  Count: 1

Note that if the duration period of a particular snapshot lock expires but others remain, OneFS will not delete that snapshot until all the locks on it have been deleted or expired.

The following table provides an example snapshot expiration schedule, with monthly locked snapshots to prevent deletion:

Roles-based Access Control

Read-only snapshots plus locks present physically secure snapshots on a cluster. However, if you can login to the cluster and have the required elevated administrator privileges to do so, you can still remove locks and/or delete snapshots.

Because data security threats come from inside an environment as well as out, such as from a disgruntled IT employee or other internal bad actor, another key to a robust security profile is to constrain the use of all-powerful ‘root’, ‘administrator’, and ‘sudo’ accounts as much as possible. Instead, of granting cluster admins full rights, a preferred security best practice is to leverage the comprehensive authentication, authorization, and accounting framework that OneFS natively provides.

OneFS role-based access control (RBAC) can be used to explicitly limit who has access to manage and delete snapshots. This granular control allows you to craft administrative roles that can create and manage snapshot schedules, but prevent their unlocking and/or deletion. Similarly, lock removal and snapshot deletion can be isolated to a specific security role (or to root only).

A cluster security administrator selects the desired access zone, creates a zone-aware role within it, assigns privileges, and then assigns members.

For example, from the WebUI under Access > Membership and roles > Roles:

When these members access the cluster through the WebUI, PlatformAPI, or CLI, they inherit their assigned privileges.

The specific privileges that can be used to segment OneFS snapshot management include:

Each privilege can be assigned one of four permission levels for a role, including:

The ability for a user to delete a snapshot is governed by the ‘ISI_PRIV_SNAPSHOT_SNAPSHOTMANAGEMENT’ privilege. Similarly, the ‘ISI_PRIV_SNAPSHOT_LOCKS’ privilege governs lock creation and removal.

In the following example, the ‘snap’ role has ‘read’ rights for the ‘ISI_PRIV_SNAPSHOT_LOCKS’ privilege, allowing a user associated with this role to view snapshot locks:

# isi auth roles view snap | grep -I -A 1 locks
             ID: ISI_PRIV_SNAPSHOT_LOCKS
     Permission: r
--
# isi snapshot locks list snaploc1
ID
----
1
----
Total: 1

However, attempts to remove the lock ‘ID 1’ from the ‘snaploc1’ snapshot fail without write privileges:

# isi snapshot locks delete snaploc1 1
Privilege check failed. The following write privilege is required: Snapshot locks (ISI_PRIV_SNAPSHOT_LOCKS)

Write privileges are added to ‘ISI_PRIV_SNAPSHOT_LOCKS’ in the ‘’snaploc1’ role:

# isi auth roles modify snap –-add-priv-write ISI_PRIV_SNAPSHOT_LOCKS
# isi auth roles view snap | grep -I -A 1 locks
             ID: ISI_PRIV_SNAPSHOT_LOCKS
     Permission: w
--

This allows the lock ‘ID 1’ to be successfully deleted from the ‘snaploc1’ snapshot:

# isi snapshot locks delete snaploc1 1
Are you sure you want to delete snapshot lock 1 from snaploc1? (yes/[no]): yes
# isi snap locks view snaploc1 1
No such lock

Using OneFS RBAC, an enhanced security approach for a site could be to create three OneFS roles on a cluster, each with an increasing realm of trust:

1.  First, an IT ops/helpdesk role with ‘read’ access to the snapshot attributes would permit monitoring and troubleshooting, but no changes:

2.  Next, a cluster admin role, with ‘read’ privileges for ‘ISI_PRIV_SNAPSHOT_LOCKS’ and ‘ISI_PRIV_SNAPSHOT_SNAPSHOTMANAGEMENT’ would prevent snapshot and lock deletion, but provide ‘write’ access for schedule configuration, restores, and so on.

3.  Finally, a cluster security admin role (root equivalence) would provide full snapshot configuration and management, lock control, and deletion rights:

Note that when configuring OneFS RBAC, remember to remove the ‘ISI_PRIV_AUTH’ and ‘ISI_PRIV_ROLE’ privilege from all but the most trusted administrators.

Additionally, enterprise security management tools such as CyberArk can also be incorporated to manage authentication and access control holistically across an environment. These can be configured to frequently change passwords on trusted accounts (that is, every hour or so), require multi-Level approvals prior to retrieving passwords, and track and audit password requests and trends.

While this article focuses exclusively on OneFS snapshots, the expanded use of RBAC granular privileges for enhanced security is germane to most key areas of cluster management and data protection, such as SyncIQ replication, and so on.

Snapshot replication

In addition to using snapshots for its own checkpointing system, SyncIQ, the OneFS data replication engine, supports snapshot replication to a target cluster.

OneFS SyncIQ replication policies contain an option for triggering a replication policy when a snapshot of the source directory is completed. Additionally, at the onset of a new policy configuration, when the “Whenever a Snapshot of the Source Directory is Taken” option is selected, a checkbox appears to enable any existing snapshots in the source directory to be replicated. More information is available in this SyncIQ paper.

Cyber-vaulting

File data is arguably the most difficult to protect, because:

• It is the only type of data where potentially all employees have a direct connection to the storage (with the other type of storage it’s through an application)
• File data is linked (or mounted) to the operating system of the client. This means that it’s sufficient to gain file access to the OS to get access to potentially critical data.
• Users are the largest breach points.

The Cyber Security Framework (CSF) from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) categorizes the threat through recovery process:

Within the ‘Protect’ phase, there are two core aspects:

• Applying all the core protection features available on the OneFS platform, namely:

• Data isolation provides a last resort copy of business critical data, and can be achieved by using an air gap to isolate the cyber vault copy of the data. The vault copy is logically separated from the production copy of the data. Data syncing happens only intermittently by closing the air gap after ensuring that there are no known issues.

The combination of OneFS snapshots and SyncIQ replication allows for granular data recovery. This means that only the affected files are recovered, while the most recent changes are preserved for the unaffected data. While an on-prem air-gapped cyber vault can still provide secure network isolation, in the event of an attack, the ability to failover to a fully operational ‘clean slate’ remote site provides additional security and peace of mind.

We’ll explore PowerScale cyber protection and recovery in more depth in a future article.

Author: Nick Trimbee

The previous article in this series looked at an overview of OneFS SupportAssist. Now, we’ll turn our attention to its core architecture and operation.

Under the hood, SupportAssist relies on the following infrastructure and services:

Of these, ESE, isi_crispies_d, isi_rice_d, and the Transaction Journal are new in OneFS 9.5 and exclusive to SupportAssist. By contrast, Gconfig, MCP, and Tardis are all legacy services that are used by multiple other OneFS components.

The Remote Information Connectivity Engine (RICE) represents the new SupportAssist ecosystem for OneFS to connect to the Dell backend. The high level architecture is as follows:

Dell’s Embedded Service Enabler (ESE) is at the core of the connectivity platform and acts as a unified communications broker between the PowerScale cluster and Dell Support. ESE runs as a OneFS service and, on startup, looks for an on-premises gateway server. If none is found, it connects back to the connectivity pipe (SRS). The collector service then interacts with ESE to send telemetry, obtain upgrade packages, transmit alerts and events, and so on.

Depending on the available resources, ESE provides a base functionality with additional optional capabilities to enhance serviceability. ESE is multithreaded, and each payload type is handled by specific threads. For example, events are handled by event threads, binary and structured payloads are handled by web threads, and so on. Within OneFS, ESE gets installed to /usr/local/ese and runs as ‘ese’ user and group.

The responsibilities of isi_rice_d include listening for network changes, getting eligible nodes elected for communication, monitoring notifications from CRISPIES, and engaging Task Manager when ESE is ready to go.

The Task Manager is a core component of the RICE engine. Its responsibility is to watch the incoming tasks that are placed into the journal and to assign workers to step through the tasks  until completion. It controls the resource utilization (Python threads) and distributes tasks that are waiting on a priority basis.

The ‘isi_crispies_d’ service exists to ensure that ESE is only running on the RICE active node, and nowhere else. It acts, in effect, like a specialized MCP just for ESE and RICE-associated services, such as IPA. This entails starting ESE on the RICE active node, re-starting it if it crashes on the RICE active node, and stopping it and restarting it on the appropriate node if the RICE active instance moves to another node. We are using ‘isi_crispies_d’ for this, and not MCP, because MCP does not support a service running on only one node at a time.

The core responsibilities of ‘isi_crispies_d’ include:

• Starting and stopping ESE on the RICE active node
• Monitoring ESE and restarting, if necessary. ‘isi_crispies_d’ restarts ESE on the node if it crashes. It will retry a couple of times and then notify RICE if it’s unable to start ESE.
• Listening for gconfig changes and updating ESE. Stopping ESE if unable to make a change and notifying RICE.
• Monitoring other related services.

The state of ESE, and of other RICE service peripherals, is stored in the OneFS tardis configuration database so that it can be checked by RICE. Similarly, ‘isi_crispies_d’ monitors the OneFS Tardis configuration database to see which node is designated as the RICE ‘active’ node.

The ‘isi_telemetry_d’ daemon is started by MCP and runs when SupportAssist is enabled. It does not have to be running on the same node as the active RICE and ESE instance. Only one instance of ‘isi_telemetry_d’ will be active at any time, and the other nodes will be waiting for the lock.

You can query the current status and setup of SupportAssist on a PowerScale cluster by using the ‘isi supportassist settings view’ CLI command. For example:

# isi supportassist settings view
        Service enabled: Yes
       Connection State: enabled
      OneFS Software ID: ELMISL08224764
          Network Pools: subnet0:pool0
        Connection mode: direct
           Gateway host: -
           Gateway port: -
    Backup Gateway host: -
    Backup Gateway port: -
  Enable Remote Support: Yes
Automatic Case Creation: Yes
       Download enabled: Yes

You can also do this from the WebUI by navigating to Cluster management > General settings > SupportAssist:

You can enable or disable SupportAssist by using the ‘isi services’ CLI command set. For example:

# isi services isi_supportassist disable
The service 'isi_supportassist' has been disabled.
# isi services isi_supportassist enable
The service 'isi_supportassist' has been enabled.
# isi services -a | grep supportassist
   isi_supportassist    SupportAssist Monitor                    Enabled

You can check the core services, as follows:

# ps -auxw | grep -e 'rice' -e 'crispies' | grep -v grep
root    8348    9.4   0.0 109844  60984  -   Ss   22:14        0:00.06 /usr/libexec/isilon/isi_crispies_d /usr/bin/isi_crispies_d
root    8183    8.8   0.0 108060  64396  -   Ss   22:14        0:01.58 /usr/libexec/isilon/isi_rice_d /usr/bin/isi_rice_d

Note that when a cluster is provisioned with SupportAssist, ESRS can no longer be used. However, customers that have not previously connected their clusters to Dell Support can still provision ESRS, but will be presented with a message encouraging them to adopt the best practice of using SupportAssist.

Additionally, SupportAssist in OneFS 9.5 does not currently support IPv6 networking, so clusters deployed in IPv6 environments should continue to use ESRS until SupportAssist IPv6 integration is introduced in a future OneFS release.

Author: Nick Trimbee

In this final article in the OneFS SupportAssist series, we turn our attention to management and troubleshooting.

Once the provisioning process above is complete, the isi supportassist settings view CLI command reports the status and health of SupportAssist operations on the cluster.

# isi supportassist settings view
        Service enabled: Yes
       Connection State: enabled
      OneFS Software ID: xxxxxxxxxx
          Network Pools: subnet0:pool0
        Connection mode: direct
           Gateway host: -
           Gateway port: -
    Backup Gateway host: -
    Backup Gateway port: -
  Enable Remote Support: Yes
Automatic Case Creation: Yes
       Download enabled: Yes

This can also be obtained from the WebUI by going to Cluster management > General settings > SupportAssist:

 There are some caveats and considerations to keep in mind when upgrading to OneFS 9.5 and enabling SupportAssist, including:

• SupportAssist is disabled when STIG hardening is applied to a cluster.
• Using SupportAssist on a hardened cluster is not supported.
• Clusters with the OneFS network firewall enabled (isi network firewall settings) might need to allow outbound traffic on port 9443.
• SupportAssist is supported on a cluster that’s running in Compliance mode.
• Secure keys are held in key manager under the RICE domain.

Also, note that Secure Remote Services can no longer be used after SupportAssist has been provisioned on a cluster.

SupportAssist has a variety of components that gather and transmit various pieces of OneFS data and telemetry to Dell Support and backend services through the Embedded Service Enabler (ESE). These workflows include CELOG events; in-product activation (IPA) information; CloudIQ telemetry data; Isi-Gather-info (IGI) logsets; and provisioning, configuration, and authentication data to ESE and the various backend services.

CELOG

Once SupportAssist is up and running, it can be configured to send CELOG events and attachments  through ESE to CLM. This can be managed by the isi event channels CLI command syntax. For example:

# isi event channels list
ID   Name                Type          Enabled
-----------------------------------------------
1    RemoteSupport       connectemc    No
2    Heartbeat Self-Test heartbeat     Yes
3    SupportAssist       supportassist No
-----------------------------------------------
Total: 3
# isi event channels view SupportAssist
     ID: 3
   Name: SupportAssist
   Type: supportassist
Enabled: No

Or from the WebUI:

CloudIQ telemetry

In OneFS 9.5, SupportAssist provides an option to send telemetry data to CloudIQ. This can be enabled from the CLI as follows:

# isi supportassist telemetry modify --telemetry-enabled 1 --telemetry-persist 0
# isi supportassist telemetry view
        Telemetry Enabled: Yes
        Telemetry Persist: No
        Telemetry Threads: 8
Offline Collection Period: 7200

Or in the SupportAssist WebUI:

Diagnostics gather

Also in OneFS 9.5, the isi diagnostics gather and isi_gather_info CLI commands both include a --supportassist upload option for log gathers, which also allows them to continue to function through a new “emergency mode” when the cluster is unhealthy. For example, to start a gather from the CLI that will be uploaded through SupportAssist:

# isi diagnostics gather start –supportassist 1

Similarly, for ISI gather info:

# isi_gather_info --supportassist

Or to explicitly avoid using SupportAssist for ISI gather info log gather upload:

# isi_gather_info --nosupportassist

This can also be configured from the WebUI at Cluster management > General configuration > Diagnostics > Gather:

License Activation through SupportAssist

PowerScale License Activation (previously known as In-Product Activation) facilitates the management of the cluster's entitlements and licenses by communicating directly with Software Licensing Central through SupportAssist.

To activate OneFS product licenses through the SupportAssist WebUI:

1. Go to Cluster management > Licensing. 
   For example, on a new cluster without any signed licenses:
   
   
    
2. Click the Update & Refresh button in the License Activation section. In the Activation File Wizard, select the software modules that you want in the activation file.
   
    
   
   
3. Select Review changes, review, click Proceed, and finally Activate

Note that it can take up to 24 hours for the activation to occur.

Alternatively, cluster license activation codes (LAC) can also be added manually.

Troubleshooting

When it comes to troubleshooting SupportAssist, the basic process flow is as follows:

 
The OneFS components and services above are:

Of these, ESE, isi_crispies_d, isi_rice_d, and the transaction journal are new in OneFS 9.5 and exclusive to SupportAssist. In contrast, Gconfig, MCP, and Tardis are all legacy services that are used by multiple other OneFS components. 

For its connectivity, SupportAssist elects a single leader single node within the subnet pool, and NANON nodes are automatically avoided. Ports 443 and 8443 are required to be open for bi-directional communication between the cluster and Connectivity Hub, and port 9443 is for communicating with a gateway. The SupportAssist ESE component communicates with a number of Dell backend services:

• SRS
• Connectivity Hub
• CLM
• ELMS/Licensing
• SDR
• Lightning
• Log Processor
• CloudIQ
• ESE

Debugging backend issues might involve one or more services, and Dell Support can assist with this process.

The main log files for investigating and troubleshooting SupportAssist issues and idiosyncrasies are isi_rice_d.log and isi_crispies_d.log. There is also an ese_log, which can be useful, too. These logs can be found at:

Debug level logging can be configured from the CLI as follows:

# isi_for_array isi_ilog -a isi_crispies_d --level=debug+
# isi_for_array isi_ilog -a isi_rice_d --level=debug+

Note that the OneFS log gathers (such as the output from the isi_gather_info utility) will capture all the above log files, plus the pertinent SupportAssist Gconfig contexts and Tardis namespaces, for later analysis.

If needed, the Rice and ESE configurations can also be viewed as follows:

# isi_gconfig -t ese
[root] {version:1}
ese.mode (char*) = direct
ese.connection_state (char*) = disabled
ese.enable_remote_support (bool) = true
ese.automatic_case_creation (bool) = true
ese.event_muted (bool) = false
ese.primary_contact.first_name (char*) =
ese.primary_contact.last_name (char*) =
ese.primary_contact.email (char*) =
ese.primary_contact.phone (char*) =
ese.primary_contact.language (char*) =
ese.secondary_contact.first_name (char*) =
ese.secondary_contact.last_name (char*) =
ese.secondary_contact.email (char*) =
ese.secondary_contact.phone (char*) =
ese.secondary_contact.language (char*) =
(empty dir ese.gateway_endpoints)
ese.defaultBackendType (char*) = srs
ese.ipAddress (char*) = 127.0.0.1
ese.useSSL (bool) = true
ese.srsPrefix (char*) = /esrs/{version}/devices
ese.directEndpointsUseProxy (bool) = false
ese.enableDataItemApi (bool) = true
ese.usingBuiltinConfig (bool) = false
ese.productFrontendPrefix (char*) = platform/16/supportassist
ese.productFrontendType (char*) = webrest
ese.contractVersion (char*) = 1.0
ese.systemMode (char*) = normal
ese.srsTransferType (char*) = ISILON-GW
ese.targetEnvironment (char*) = PROD
 
# isi_gconfig -t rice
[root] {version:1}
rice.enabled (bool) = false
rice.ese_provisioned (bool) = false
rice.hardware_key_present (bool) = false
rice.supportassist_dismissed (bool) = false
rice.eligible_lnns (char*) = []
rice.instance_swid (char*) =
rice.task_prune_interval (int) = 86400
rice.last_task_prune_time (uint) = 0
rice.event_prune_max_items (int) = 100
rice.event_prune_days_to_keep (int) = 30
rice.jnl_tasks_prune_max_items (int) = 100
rice.jnl_tasks_prune_days_to_keep (int) = 30
rice.config_reserved_workers (int) = 1
rice.event_reserved_workers (int) = 1
rice.telemetry_reserved_workers (int) = 1
rice.license_reserved_workers (int) = 1
rice.log_reserved_workers (int) = 1
rice.download_reserved_workers (int) = 1
rice.misc_task_workers (int) = 3
rice.accepted_terms (bool) = false
(empty dir rice.network_pools)
rice.telemetry_enabled (bool) = true
rice.telemetry_persist (bool) = false
rice.telemetry_threads (uint) = 8
rice.enable_download (bool) = true
rice.init_performed (bool) = false
rice.ese_disconnect_alert_timeout (int) = 14400
rice.offline_collection_period (uint) = 7200

The -q flag can also be used in conjunction with the isi_gconfig command to identify any values that are not at their default settings. For example, the stock (default) Rice gconfig context will not report any configuration entries:

# isi_gconfig -q -t rice
[root] {version:1}

1. Upgrading the cluster to OneFS 9.5.
2. Obtaining the secure access key and PIN.
3. Selecting either direct connectivity or gateway connectivity.
4. If using gateway connectivity, installing Secure Connect Gateway v5.x.

In this article, we turn our attention to step 5: Provisioning SupportAssist on the cluster.

As part of this process, we’ll be using the access key and PIN credentials previously obtained from the Dell Support portal in step 2 above.

Provisioning SupportAssist on a cluster

SupportAssist can be configured from the OneFS 9.5 WebUI by going to Cluster management > General settings > SupportAssist. To initiate the provisioning process on a cluster, click the Connect SupportAssist link, as shown here:

If SupportAssist is not configured, the Remote support page displays the following banner, warning of the future deprecation of SRS:

Similarly, when SupportAssist is not configured, the SupportAssist WebUI page also displays verbiage recommending the adoption of SupportAssist:

There is also a Connect SupportAssist button to begin the provisioning process.

Selecting the Configure SupportAssist button initiates the setup wizard.

1.  Telemetry Notice

The first step requires checking and accepting the Infrastructure Telemetry Notice:

2.  Support Contract

For the next step, enter the details for the primary support contact, as prompted:

 
You can also provide the information from the CLI by using the isi supportassist contacts command set. For example:

# isi supportassist contacts modify --primary-first-name=Nick --primary-last-name=Trimbee --primary-email=trimbn@isilon.com

3.  Establish Connections

Next, complete the Establish Connections page

This involves the following steps:

• Selecting the network pool(s)
• Adding the secure access key and PIN
• Configuring either direct or gateway access
• Selecting whether to allow remote support, CloudIQ telemetry, and auto case creation
  
  

a.  Select network pool(s).

At least one statically allocated IPv4 network subnet and pool are required for provisioning SupportAssist. OneFS 9.5 does not support IPv6 networking for SupportAssist remote connectivity. However, IPv6 support is planned for a future release.

Select one or more network pools or subnets from the options displayed. In this example, we select subnet0pool0:

Or from the CLI:

Select one or more static subnets or pools for outbound communication, using the following CLI syntax:

# isi supportassist settings modify --network-pools="subnet0.pool0"

Additionally, if the cluster has the OneFS 9.5 network firewall enabled (“isi network firewall settings”), ensure that outbound traffic is allowed on port 9443.

b.  Add secure access key and PIN.

In this next step, add the secure access key and pin. These should have been obtained in an earlier step in the provisioning procedure from the following Dell Support site: https://www.dell.com/support/connectivity/product/isilon-onefs.

Alternatively, if configuring SupportAssist from the OneFS CLI, add the key and pin by using the following syntax:

# isi supportassist provision start --access-key <key> --pin <pin>

c.  Configure access.

• Direct access

Or, to configure direct access (the default) from the CLI, ensure that the following parameter is set:

# isi supportassist settings modify --connection-mode direct
# isi supportassist settings view | grep -i "connection mode"
        Connection mode: direct

• Gateway access

Alternatively, to connect through a gateway, select the Connect via Secure Connect Gateway button:

Complete the Gateway host and Gateway port fields as appropriate for the environment.

Alternatively, to set up a gateway configuration from the CLI, use the isi supportassist settings modify syntax. For example, to use the gateway FQDN secure-connect-gateway.yourdomain.com and the default port 9443:

# isi supportassist settings modify --connection-mode gateway
# isi supportassist settings view | grep -i "connection mode"
        Connection mode: gateway
# isi supportassist settings modify --gateway-host secure-connect-gateway.yourdomain.com --gateway-port 9443

When setting up the gateway connectivity option, Secure Connect Gateway v5.0 or later must be deployed within the data center. SupportAssist is incompatible with either ESRS gateway v3.52 or SAE gateway v4. However, Secure Connect Gateway v5.x is backward compatible with PowerScale OneFS ESRS, which allows the gateway to be provisioned and configured ahead of a cluster upgrade to OneFS 9.5.

d. Configure support options.

Finally, configure the support options:

When you have completed the configuration, the WebUI will confirm that SmartConnect is successfully configured and enabled, as follows:

 
Or from the CLI:

# isi supportassist settings view
        Service enabled: Yes
       Connection State: enabled
      OneFS Software ID: ELMISL0223BJJC
          Network Pools: subnet0.pool0, subnet0.testpool1, subnet0.testpool2, subnet0.testpool3, subnet0.testpool4
        Connection mode: gateway
           Gateway host: eng-sea-scgv5stg3.west.isilon.com
           Gateway port: 9443
    Backup Gateway host: eng-sea-scgv5stg.west.isilon.com
    Backup Gateway port: 9443
  Enable Remote Support: Yes
Automatic Case Creation: Yes
       Download enabled: Yes

In OneFS 9.5, several OneFS components now leverage SupportAssist as their secure off-cluster data retrieval and communication channel. These components include:

For existing clusters, SupportAssist supports the same basic workflows as its predecessor, ESRS, so the transition from old to new is generally pretty seamless.

The overall process for enabling OneFS SupportAssist is as follows:

1. Upgrade the cluster to OneFS 9.5.
2. Obtain the secure access key and PIN.
3. Select either direct connectivity or gateway connectivity.
4. If using gateway connectivity, install Secure Connect Gateway v5.x.
5. Provision SupportAssist on the cluster.

 We’ll go through each of these configuration steps in order:

1.  Upgrading to OneFS 9.5

First, the cluster must be running OneFS 9.5 to configure SupportAssist.

There are some additional considerations and caveats to bear in mind when upgrading to OneFS 9.5 and planning on enabling SupportAssist. These include:

• SupportAssist is disabled when STIG hardening is applied to the cluster.
• Using SupportAssist on a hardened cluster is not supported.
• Clusters with the OneFS network firewall enabled (”isi network firewall settings”) might need to allow outbound traffic on ports 443 and 8443, plus 9443 if gateway (SCG) connectivity is configured.
• SupportAssist is supported on a cluster that’s running in Compliance mode.
• If you are upgrading from an earlier release, the OneFS 9.5 upgrade must be committed before SupportAssist can be provisioned.

Also, ensure that the user account that will be used to enable SupportAssist belongs to a role with the ISI_PRIV_REMOTE_SUPPORT read and write privilege:

# isi auth privileges | grep REMOTE
ISI_PRIV_REMOTE_SUPPORT                           
  Configure remote support

 For example, for an ese user account:

# isi auth roles view SupportAssistRole
       Name: SupportAssistRole
Description: -
    Members: ese
 Privileges
             ID: ISI_PRIV_LOGIN_PAPI
     Permission: r
             ID: ISI_PRIV_REMOTE_SUPPORT
      Permission: w

2.  Obtaining secure access key and PIN

An access key and pin are required to provision SupportAssist, and these secure keys are held in key manager under the RICE domain. This access key and pin can be obtained from the following Dell Support site: https://www.dell.com/support/connectivity/product/isilon-onefs.

In the Quick link navigation bar, select the Generate Access key link:

 On the following page, select the appropriate button:

The credentials required to obtain an access key and pin vary, depending on prior cluster configuration. Sites that have previously provisioned ESRS will need their OneFS Software ID (SWID) to obtain their access key and pin.

The isi license list CLI command can be used to determine a cluster’s SWID. For example:

# isi license list | grep "OneFS Software ID"
OneFS Software ID: ELMISL999CKKD

However, customers with new clusters and/or customers who have not previously provisioned ESRS or SupportAssist will require their Site ID to obtain the access key and pin.

Note that any new cluster hardware shipping after January 2023 will already have an integrated key, so this key can be used in place of the Site ID.

For example, if this is the first time registering this cluster and it does not have an integrated key, select Yes, let’s register:

 Enter the Site ID, site name, and location information for the cluster:

Choose a 4-digit PIN and save it for future reference. After that, click Create My Access Key:

The access key is then generated.
 

An automated email containing the pertinent key info is sent from the Dell | ServicesConnectivity Team. For example:

This access key is valid for one week, after which it automatically expires.

Next, in the cluster’s WebUI, go back to Cluster management > General settings > SupportAssist and enter the access key and PIN information in the appropriate fields. Finally, click Finish Setup to complete the SupportAssist provisioning process:

3.  Deciding between direct or gateway topology 

A topology decision will need to be made between implementing either direct connectivity or gateway connectivity, depending on the needs of the environment:

• Direct connect:

• Gateway connect:

SupportAssist uses ports 443 and 8443 by default for bi-directional communication between the cluster and Connectivity Hub. These ports will need to be open across any firewalls or packet filters between the cluster and the corporate network edge to allow connectivity to Dell Support.

Additionally, port 9443 is used for communicating with a gateway (SCG).

# grep -i esrs /etc/services
isi_esrs_d      9443/tcp   #EMC Secure Remote Support outbound alerts

4.  Installing Secure Connect Gateway (optional) 

This step is only required when deploying Dell Secure Connect Gateway (SCG). If a direct connect topology is preferred, go directly to step 5.

When configuring SupportAssist with the gateway connectivity option, Secure Connect Gateway v5.0 or later must be deployed within the data center.

Dell SCG is available for Linux, Windows, Hyper-V, and VMware environments, and, as of this writing, the latest version is 5.14.00.16. The installation binaries can be downloaded from https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/secure-connect-gateway/drivers.

Download SCG as follows:

1. Sign in to www.dell.com/SCG-App. The Secure Connect Gateway - Application Edition page is displayed. If you have issues signing in using your business account or if you are unable to access the page even after signing in, contact Dell Administrative Support.
2. In the Quick links section, click Generate Access key.
3. On the Generate Access Keypage, perform the following steps:
   1. Select a site ID, site name, or site location.
   2. Enter a four-digit PIN and click Generate key. An access key is generated and sent to your email address. NOTE: The access key and PIN must be used within seven days and cannot be used to register multiple instances of SCG.
   3. Click Done.
4. On the Secure Connect Gateway – Application Edition page, click the Drivers & Downloads tab.
5. Search and select the required version.
6. In the ACTION column, click Download.

The following steps are required to set up SCG:

https://dl.dell.com/content/docu105633_secure-connect-gateway-application-edition-quick-setup-guide.pdf?language=en-us

 Pertinent resources for installing SCG include:

• Users guide, for system and network requirements, steps to create business account, and installation instructions: https://www.dell.com/SCG-App-docs
• Support matrix, for supported devices, protocols, firmware versions, and operating systems: https://www.dell.com/SCG-App-docs

Another useful source of SCG installation, configuration, and troubleshooting information is the Dell Support forum: https://www.dell.com/community/Secure-Connect-Gateway/bd-p/SCG

5.  Provisioning SupportAssist on the cluster

 At this point, the off-cluster prestaging work should be complete.

In the next article in this series, we turn our attention to the SupportAssist provisioning process on the cluster itself (step 5).

For enterprises to harness the advantages of advanced storage technologies with Dell PowerScale, a transition from an existing platform is necessary. Enterprises are challenged by how the new architecture will fit into the existing infrastructure. This blog post provides an overview of PowerScale architecture, features, and nomenclature for enterprises migrating from NetApp ONTAP.

PowerScale overview

The PowerScale OneFS operating system is based on a distributed architecture, built from the ground up as a clustered system. Each PowerScale node provides compute, memory, networking, and storage. The concepts of controllers, HA, active/standby, and disk shelves are not applicable in a pure scale-out architecture. Thus, when a node is added to a cluster, the cluster performance and capacity increase collectively.

Due to the scale-out distributed architecture with a single namespace, single volume, single file system, and one single pane of management, the system management is far simpler than with traditional NAS platforms. In addition, the data protection is software-based rather than RAID-based, eliminating all the associated complexities, including configuration, maintenance, and additional storage utilization. Administrators do not have to be concerned with RAID groups or load distribution.

NetApp’s ONTAP storage operating system has evolved into a clustered system with controllers. The system includes ONTAP FlexGroups composed of aggregates and FlexVols across nodes.

OneFS is a single volume, which makes cluster management simple. As the cluster grows in capacity, the single volume automatically grows. Administrators are no longer required to migrate data between volumes manually. OneFS repopulates and balances data between all nodes when a new node is added, making the node part of the global namespace. All the nodes in a PowerScale cluster are equal in the hierarchy. Drives share data intranode and internode.

PowerScale is easy to deploy, operate, and manage. Most enterprises require only one full-time employee to manage a PowerScale cluster.

For more information about the PowerScale OneFS architecture, see PowerScale OneFS Technical Overview and Dell PowerScale OneFS Operating System.

Figure 1. Dell PowerScale scale-out NAS architecture

OneFS and NetApp software features

The single volume and single namespace of PowerScale OneFS also lead to a unique feature set. Because the entire NAS is a single file system, the concepts of FlexVols, shares, qtrees, and FlexGroups do not apply. Each NetApp volume has specific properties associated with limited storage space. Adding more storage space to NetApp ONTAP could be an onerous process depending on the current architecture. Conversely, on a PowerScale cluster, as soon as a node is added, the cluster is rebalanced automatically, leading to minimal administrator management. 

NetApp’s continued dependence on volumes creates potential added complexity for storage administrators. From a software perspective, the intricacies that arise from the concept of volumes span across all the features. Configuring software features requires administrators to base decisions on the volume concept, limiting configuration options. The volume concept is further magnified by the impacts on storage utilization. 

The fact that OneFS is a single volume means that many features are not volume dependent but, rather, span the entire cluster. SnapshotIQ, NDMP backups, and SmartQuotas do not have limits based on volumes; instead, they are cluster-specific or directory-specific.

As a single-volume NAS designed for file storage, OneFS has the scalable capacity with ease of management combined with features that administrators require. Robust policy-driven features such as SmartConnect, SmartPools, and CloudPools enable maximum utilization of nodes for superior performance and storage efficiency for maximum value. You can use SmartConnect to configure access zones that are mapped to specific node performances. SmartPools can tier cold data to nodes with deep archive storage, and CloudPools can store frozen data in the cloud. Regardless of where the data is residing, it is presented as a single namespace to the end user.

Storage utilization and data protection

Storage utilization is the amount of storage available after the NAS system overhead is deducted. The overhead consists of the space required for data protection and the operating system.

For data protection, OneFS uses software-based Reed-Solomon Error Correction with up to N+4 protection. OneFS offers several custom protection options that cover node and drive failures. The custom protection options vary according to the cluster configuration. OneFS provides data protection against more simultaneous hardware failures and is software-based, providing a significantly higher storage utilization. 

The software-based data protection stripes data across nodes in stripe units, and some of the stripe units are Forward Error Correction (FEC) or parity units. The FEC units provide a variable to reformulate the data in the case of a drive or node failure. Data protection is customizable to be for node loss or hybrid protection of node and drive failure.

With software-based data protection, the protection scheme is not per cluster. It has additional granularity that allows for making data protection specific to a file or directory—without creating additional storage volumes or manually migrating data. Instead, OneFS runs a job in the background, moving data as configured.

Figure 2. OneFS data protection

OneFS protects data stored on failing nodes, or drives in a cluster through a process called SmartFail. During the process, OneFS places a device into quarantine and, depending on the severity of the issue, places the data on the device into a read-only state. While a device is quarantined, OneFS reprotects the data on the device by distributing the data to other devices. 

NetApp’s data protection is all RAID-based, including NetApp RAID-TEC, NetApp RAID-DP, and RAID 4. NetApp only supports a maximum of triple parity, and simultaneous node failures in an HA pair are not supported. 

For more information about SmartFail, see the following blog: OneFS Smartfail. For more information about OneFS data protection, see High Availability and Data Protection with Dell PowerScale Scale-Out NAS.

NetApp FlexVols, shares, and Qtrees

NetApp requires administrators to manually create space and explicitly define aggregates and flexible volumes. The concept of FlexVols, shares, and Qtrees are nonexistent in OneFS, as the file system is a single volume and namespace, spanning the entire cluster. 

SMB shares and NFS exports are created through the web or command-line interface in OneFS. Both methods allow the user to create either within seconds with security options. SmartQuotas is used to manage storage limits, cluster-wide, across the entire namespace. They include accounting, warning messages, or hard limits of enforcement. The limits can be applied by directory, user, or group. 

Conversely, ONTAP quota management is at the volume or FlexGroup level, creating additional administrative overhead because the process is more onerous.

Snapshots

The OneFS snapshot feature is SnapshotIQ, which does not have specified or enforced limits for snapshots per directory or snapshots per cluster. However, the best practice is 1,024 snapshots per directory and 20,000 snapshots per cluster. OneFS also supports writable snapshots. For more information about SnapshotIQ and writable snapshots, see High Availability and Data Protection with Dell PowerScale Scale-Out NAS.

NetApp Snapshot supports 255 snapshots per volume in ONTAP 9.3 and earlier. ONTAP 9.4 and later versions support 1,023 snapshots per volume. By default, NetApp requires a space reservation of 5 percent in the volume when snapshots are used, requiring the space reservation to be monitored and manually increased if space becomes exhausted. Further, the space reservation can also affect volume availability. The space reservation requirement creates additional administration overhead and affects storage efficiency by setting aside space that might or might not be used.

Data replication

Data replication is required for disaster recovery, RPO, or RTO requirements. OneFS provides data replication through SyncIQ and SmartSync. 

SyncIQ provides asynchronous data replication, whereas NetApp’s asynchronous replication, which is called SnapMirror, is block-based replication. SyncIQ provides options for ensuring that all data is retained during failover and failback from the disaster recovery cluster. SyncIQ is fully configurable with options for execution times and bandwidth management. A SyncIQ target cluster may be configured as a target for several source clusters. 

SyncIQ offers a single-button automated process for failover and failback with Superna Eyeglass DR Edition. For more information about Superna Eyeglass DR Edition, see Superna | DR Edition (supernaeyeglass.com).

SyncIQ allows configurable options for replication down to a specific file, directory, or entire cluster. Conversely, NetApp’s SnapMirror replication starts at the volume at a minimum. The volume concept and dependence on volume requirements continue to add management complexity and overhead for administrators while also wasting storage utilization.

To address the requirements of the modern enterprise, OneFS version 9.4.0.0 introduced SmartSync. This feature replicates file-to-file data between PowerScale clusters. SmartSync cloud copy replicates file-to-object data from PowerScale clusters to Dell ECS and cloud providers. Having multiple target destinations allows administrators to store multiple copies of a dataset across locations, providing further disaster recovery readiness. SmartSync cloud copy replicates file-to-object data from PowerScale clusters to Dell ECS and cloud providers. SmartSync cloud copy also pulls the replicated object data from a cloud provider back to a PowerScale cluster in file. For more information about SyncIQ, see Dell PowerScale SyncIQ: Architecture, Configuration, and Considerations. For more information about SmartSync, see Dell PowerScale SmartSync.

Quotas

OneFS SmartQuotas provides configurable options to monitor and enforce storage limits at the user, group, cluster, directory, or subdirectory level. ONTAP quotas are user-, tree-, volume-, or group-based.

For more information about SmartQuotas, see Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas.

Load balancing and multitenancy

Because OneFS is a distributed architecture across a collection of nodes, client connectivity to these nodes requires load balancing. OneFS SmartConnect provides options for balancing the client connections to the nodes within a cluster. Balancing options are round-robin or based on current load. Also, SmartConnect zones can be configured to have clients connect based on group and performance needs. For example, the Engineering group might require high-performance nodes. A zone can be configured, forcing connections to those nodes.

NetApp ONTAP supports multitenancy with Storage Virtual Machines (SVMs), formerly vServers and Logical Interfaces (LIFs). SVMs isolate storage and network resources across a cluster of controller HA pairs. SVMs require managing protocols, shares, and volumes for successful provisioning. Volumes cannot be nondisruptively moved between SVMs. ONTAP supports load balancing using LIFs, but configuration is manual and must be implemented by the storage administrator. Further, it requires continuous monitoring because it is based on the load on the controller. 

OneFS provides multitenancy through SmartConnect and access zones. Management is simple because the file system is one volume and access is provided by hostname and directory, rather than by volume. SmartConnect is policy-driven and does not require continuous monitoring. SmartConnect settings may be changed on demand as the requirements change.

SmartConnect zones allow administrators to provision DNS hostnames specific to IP pools, subnets, and network interfaces. If only a single authentication provider is required, all the SmartConnect zones map to a default access zone. However, if directory access and authentication providers vary, multiple access zones are provisioned, mapping to a directory, authentication provider, and SmartConnect zone. As a result, authenticated users of an access zone only have visibility into their respective directory. Conversely, an administrator with complete file system access can migrate data nondisruptively between directories.

For more information about SmartConnect, see PowerScale: Network Design Considerations.

Compression and deduplication

Both ONTAP and OneFS provide compression. The OneFS deduplication feature is SmartDedupe, which allows deduplication to run at a cluster-wide level, improving overall Data Reduction Rate (DRR) and storage utilization. With ONTAP, the deduplication is enabled at the aggregate level, and it cannot cross over nodes. 

For more information about OneFS data reduction, see Dell PowerScale OneFS: Data Reduction and Storage Efficiency. For more information about SmartDedupe, see Next-Generation Storage Efficiency with Dell PowerScale SmartDedupe.

Data tiering

OneFS has integrated features to tier data based on the data’s age or file type. NetApp has similar functionality with FabricPools.

OneFS SmartPools uses robust policies to enable data placement and movement across multiple types of storage. SmartPools can be configured to move data to a set of nodes automatically. For example, if a file has not been accessed in the last 90 days, in can be migrated to a node with deeper storage, allowing admins to define the value of storage based on performance. 

OneFS CloudPools migrates data to a cloud provider, with only a stub remaining on the PowerScale cluster, based on similar policies. CloudPools not only tiers data to a cloud provider but also recalls the data back to the cluster as demanded. From a user perspective, all the data is still in a single namespace, irrespective of where it resides.

Figure 3. OneFS SmartPools and CloudPools

ONTAP tiers to S3 object stores using FabricPools.

For more information about SmartPools, see Storage Tiering with Dell PowerScale SmartPools. For more information about CloudPools, see:

• Dell PowerScale: CloudPools and Amazon Web Services
• Dell PowerScale: CloudPools and Amazon Web Services
• Dell PowerScale: CloudPools and Alibaba Cloud
• Dell PowerScale: CloudPools and Google Cloud
• Dell PowerScale: CloudPools and ECS

Monitoring

Dell InsightIQ and Dell CloudIQ provide performance monitoring and reporting capabilities. InsightIQ includes advanced analytics to optimize applications, correlate cluster events, and accurately forecast future storage needs. NetApp provides performance monitoring and reporting with Cloud Insights and Active IQ, which are accessible within BlueXP.  

For more information about CloudIQ, see CloudIQ: A Detailed Review. For more information about InsightIQ, see InsightIQ on Dell Support.

Security

Similar to ONTAP, the PowerScale OneFS operating system comes with a comprehensive set of integrated security features. These features include data at rest and data in flight encryption, virus scanning tool, WORM SmartLock compliance, external key manager for data at rest encryption, STIG-hardened security profile, Common Criteria certification, and support for UEFI Secure Boot across PowerScale platforms. Further, OneFS may be configured for a Zero Trust architecture and PCI-DSS. 

Superna security 

Superna exclusively provides the following security-focused applications for PowerScale OneFS: 

• Ransomware Defender: Provides real-time event processing through user behavior analytics. The events are used to detect and stop a ransomware attack before it occurs.
• Easy Auditor: Offers a flat-rate license model and ease-of-use features that simplify auditing and securing PBs of data.
• Performance Auditor: Provides real-time file I/O view of PowerScale nodes to simplify root cause of performance impacts, assessing changes needed to optimize performance and debugging user, network, and application performance.
• Airgap: Deployed in two configurations depending on the scale of clusters and security features:
• Basic Airgap Configuration that deploys the Ransomware Defender agent on one of the primary clusters being protected.
• Enterprise Airgap Configuration that deploys the Ransomware Defender agent on the cyber vault cluster. This solution comes with greater scalability and additional security features.

Figure 4. Superna security

NetApp ONTAP security is limited to the integrated features listed above. Additional applications for further security monitoring, like Superna, are not available for ONTAP.

For more information about Superna security, see supernaeyeglass.com. For more information about PowerScale security, see Dell PowerScale OneFS: Security Considerations.

Authentication and access control

NetApp and PowerScale OneFS both support several methods for user authentication and access control. OneFS supports UNIX and Windows permissions for data-level access control. OneFS is designed for a mixed environment that allows the configuration of both Windows Access Control Lists (ACLs) and standard UNIX permissions on the cluster file system. In addition, OneFS provides user and identity mapping, permission mapping, and merging between Windows and UNIX environments.

OneFS supports local and remote authentication providers. Anonymous access is supported for protocols that allow it. Concurrent use of multiple authentication provider types, including Active Directory, LDAP, and NIS, is supported. For example, OneFS is often configured to authenticate Windows clients with Active Directory and to authenticate UNIX clients with LDAP.

Role-based access control

OneFS supports role-based access control (RBAC), allowing administrative tasks to be configured without a root or administrator account. A role is a collection of OneFS privileges that are limited to an area of administration. Custom roles for security, auditing, storage, or backup tasks may be provisioned with RBACs. Privileges are assigned to roles. As users log in to the cluster through the platform API, the OneFS command-line interface, or the OneFS web administration interface, they are granted privileges based on their role membership.

For more information about OneFS authentication and access control, see PowerScale OneFS Authentication, Identity Management, and Authorization.

Learn more about PowerScale OneFS

To learn more about PowerScale OneFS, see the following resources:

• Dell PowerScale Info Hub
• PowerScale OneFS Technical Overview
• Dell PowerScale OneFS Operating System
• OneFS Smartfail blog post
• High Availability and Data Protection with Dell PowerScale Scale-Out NAS
• Dell PowerScale SyncIQ: Architecture, Configuration, and Considerations
• Dell PowerScale: NDMP Technical Overview and Design Considerations
• Storage Quota Management and Provisioning with Dell PowerScale SmartQuotas
• PowerScale: Network Design Considerations
• Dell PowerScale OneFS: Data Reduction and Storage Efficiency
• Next-Generation Storage Efficiency with Dell PowerScale SmartDedupe
• Storage Tiering with Dell PowerScale SmartPools 
• Dell PowerScale: CloudPools and Amazon Web Services
• Dell PowerScale: CloudPools and Microsoft Azure
• Dell PowerScale: CloudPools and Alibaba Cloud
• Dell PowerScale: CloudPools and Google Cloud
• Dell PowerScale: CloudPools and ECS
• CloudIQ: A Detailed Review
• InsightIQ (Dell Support page with documentation links)
• Dell PowerScale OneFS: Security Considerations
• PowerScale OneFS Authentication, Identity Management, and Authorization
• Superna website (supernaeyeglass.com)

The previous articles in this series have covered the SmartQoS architecture, configuration, and management. Now, we’ll turn our attention to monitoring and troubleshooting.

You can use the ‘isi statistics workload’ CLI command to monitor the dataset’s performance. The ‘Ops’ column displays the current protocol operations per second. In the following example, Ops stabilize around 9.8, which is just below the configured limit value of 10 Ops.

# isi statistics workload --dataset ds1 & data

Similarly, this next example from the SmartQoS WebUI shows a small NFS workflow performing 497 protocol Ops in a pinned workload with a limit of 500 Ops:

You can pin multiple paths and protocols by selecting the ‘Pin Workload’ option for a given Dataset. Here, four directory path workloads are each configured with different Protocol Ops limits:

When it comes to troubleshooting SmartQoS, there are a few areas that are worth checking right away, including the SmartQoS Ops limit configuration, isi_pp_d and isi_stats_d daemons, and the protocol service(s).

  1. For suspected Ops limit configuration issues, first confirm that the SmartQoS limits feature is enabled:

# isi performance settings view
Top N Collections: 1024
Time In Queue Threshold (ms): 10.0
Target read latency in microseconds: 12000.0
Target write latency in microseconds: 12000.0
Protocol Ops Limit Enabled: Yes

Next, verify that the workload level protocols_ops limit is correctly configured:

# isi performance workloads view <workload>

Check whether any errors are reported in the isi_tardis_d configuration log:

# cat /var/log/isi_tardis_d.log

  2. To investigate isi_pp_d, first check that the service is enabled:

# isi services –a isi_pp_d
Service 'isi_pp_d' is enabled.

If necessary, you can restart the isi_pp_d service as follows:

# isi services isi_pp_d disable
Service 'isi_pp_d' is disabled.
# isi services isi_pp_d enable
Service 'isi_pp_d' is enabled.

There’s also an isi_pp_d debug tool, which can be helpful in a pinch:

# isi_pp_d -h
Usage: isi_pp_d [-ldhs]
-l Run as a leader process; otherwise, run as a follower. Only one leader process on the cluster will be active.
-d Run in debug mode (do not daemonize).
-s Display pp_leader node (devid and lnn)
-h Display this help.

You can enable debugging on the isi_pp_d log file with the following command syntax:

# isi_ilog -a isi_pp_d -l debug, /var/log/isi_pp_d.log

For example, the following log snippet shows a typical isi_ppd_d.log message communication between isi_pp_d leader and isi_pp_d followers:

/ifs/.ifsvar/modules/pp/comm/SETTINGS
[090500b000000b80,08020000:0000bfddffffffff,09000100:ffbcff7cbb9779de,09000100:d8d2fee9ff9e3bfe,090001 00:0000000075f0dfdf]      
100,,,,20,1658854839  < in the format of <workload_id, cputime, disk_reads, disk_writes, protocol_ops, timestamp>

Here, the extract from the /var/log/isi_pp_d.log logfiles from nodes 1 and 2 of a cluster illustrate the different stages of Protocol Ops limit enforcement and usage:

  3. To investigate the isi_stats_d, first confirm that the isi_pp_d service is enabled:

# isi services -a isi_stats_d
Service 'isi_stats_d' is enabled.

If necessary, you can restart the isi_stats_d service as follows:

# isi services isi_stats_d disable
# isi services isi_stats_d enable

You can view the workload level statistics with the following command:

# isi statistics workload list --dataset=<name>

You can enable debugging on the isi_stats_d log file with the following command syntax:

# isi_stats_tool --action set_tracelevel --value debug
# cat /var/log/isi_stats_d.log

  4. To investigate protocol issues, the ‘isi services’ and ‘lwsm’ CLI commands can be useful. For example, to check the status of the S3 protocol:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwsm list | grep -i protocol
hdfs                       [protocol]    stopped
lwswift                    [protocol]    running (lwswift: 8393)
nfs                        [protocol]    running (nfs: 8396)
s3                         [protocol]    stopped
srv                        [protocol]    running (lwio: 8096)
# /usr/likewise/bin/lwsm status s3
stopped
# /usr/likewise/bin/lwsm info s3
Service: s3
Description: S3 Server
Categories: protocol
Path: /usr/likewise/lib/lw-svcm/s3.so
Arguments:
Dependencies: lsass onefs_s3 AuditEnabled?flt_audit_s3
Container: s3

This CLI output confirms that the S3 protocol is inactive. You can start the S3 service as follows:

# isi services -a | grep -i s3
s3                   S3
Service                               Enabled

Similarly, you can restart the S3 service as follows:

# /usr/likewise/bin/lwsm restart s3
Stopping service: s3
Starting service: s3

To investigate further, you can increase the protocol’s log level verbosity. For example, to set the s3 log to ‘debug’:

# isi s3 log-level view
Current logging level is 'info'
# isi s3 log-level modify debug
# isi s3 log-level view
Current logging level is 'debug'

Next, view and monitor the appropriate protocol log. For example, for the S3 protocol:

# cat /var/log/s3.log
# tail -f /var/log/s3.log

Beyond the above, you can monitor /var/log/messages for pertinent errors, because the main partition performance (PP) modules log to this file. You can enable debug level logging for the various PP modules as follows.

Dataset:

# sysctl ilog.ifs.acct.raa.syslog=debug+
ilog.ifs.acct.raa.syslog: error,warning,notice (inherited) -> error,warning,notice,info,debug

Workload:

# sysctl ilog.ifs.acct.rat.syslog=debug+
ilog.ifs.acct.rat.syslog: error,warning,notice (inherited) -> error,warning,notice,info,debug

Actor work:

# sysctl ilog.ifs.acct.work.syslog=debug+
ilog.ifs.acct.work.syslog: error,warning,notice (inherited) -> error,warning,notice,info,debug

When finished, you can restore the default logging levels for the above modules as follows:

# sysctl ilog.ifs.acct.raa.syslog=notice+
# sysctl ilog.ifs.acct.rat.syslog=notice+
# sysctl ilog.ifs.acct.work.syslog=notice+

Author: Nick Trimbee

In the previous article in this series, we looked at the underlying architecture and management of SmartQoS in OneFS 9.5. Next, we’ll step through an example SmartQoS configuration using the CLI and WebUI.

After an initial set up, configuring a SmartQoS protocol Ops limit comprises four fundamental steps. These are:

Step 1:

First, select a metric of interest. For this example, we’ll use the following:

• Protocol: NFSv3
• Path: /ifs/test/expt_nfs

If not already present, create and verify an NFS export – in this case at /ifs/test/expt_nfs:

# isi nfs exports create /ifs/test/expt_nfs
# isi nfs exports list
ID Zone Paths Description
------------------------------------------------
1 System /ifs/test/expt_nfs
------------------------------------------------

Or from the WebUI, under Protocols UNIX sharing (NFS) > NFS exports:

Step 2:

The ‘dataset’ designation is used to categorize workload by various identification metrics, including:

SmartQoS in OneFS 9.5 only allows protocol Ops as the transient resources used for configuring a limit ceiling.

For example, you can use the following CLI command to create a dataset ‘ds1’, specifying protocol and path as the ID metrics:

# isi performance datasets create --name ds1 protocol path
Created new performance dataset 'ds1' with ID number 1.

Note: Resource usage tracking by the ‘path’ metric is only supported by SMB and NFS.

The following command displays any configured datasets:

# isi performance datasets list

Or, from the WebUI, by navigating to Cluster management > Smart QoS:

Step 3:

After you have created the dataset, you can pin a workload to it by specifying the metric values. For example:

# isi performance workloads pin ds1 protocol:nfs3 path: /ifs/test/expt_nfs

Pinned performance dataset workload with ID number 100.

Or from the WebUI, by browsing to Cluster management > Smart QoS > Pin workload:

After pinning a workload, the entry appears in the ‘Top Workloads’ section of the WebUI page. However, wait at least 30 seconds to start receiving updates.

To list all the pinned workloads from a specified dataset, use the following command:

# isi performance workloads list ds1

The prior command’s output indicates that there are currently no limits set for this workload.

By default, a protocol ops limit exists for each workload. However, it is set to the maximum (the maximum value of a 64-bit unsigned integer). This is represented in the CLI output by a dash (“-“) if a limit has not been explicitly configured:

# isi performance workloads list ds1
ID   Name  Metric Values           Creation Time       Cluster Resource Impact  Client Impact   Limits
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
100  -     path:/ifs/test/expt_nfs 2023-02-02T12:06:05  -          -              -
           protocol:nfs3
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 1

Step 4:

For a pinned workload in a dataset, you can configure a limit for the protocol ops limit from the CLI, using the following syntax:

# isi performance workloads modify <dataset> <workload ID> --limits protocol_ops:<value>

When configuring SmartQoS, always be aware that it is a powerful performance throttling tool which can be applied to significant areas of a cluster’s data and userbase. For example, protocol Ops limits can be configured for metrics such as ‘path:/ifs’, which would affect the entire /ifs filesystem, or ‘zone_name:System’ which would limit the System access zone and all users within it. While such configurations are entirely valid, they would have a significant, system-wide impact. As such, exercise caution when configuring SmartQoS to avoid any inadvertent, unintended, or unexpected performance constraints.

In the following example, the dataset is ‘ds1’, the workload ID is ‘100’, and the protocol Ops limit is set to the value ‘10’:

# isi performance workloads modify ds1 100 --limits protocol_ops:10
protocol_ops: 18446744073709551615 -> 10

Or from the WebUI, by browsing to Cluster management > Smart QoS > Pin and throttle workload:

You can use the ‘isi performance workloads’ command in ‘list’ mode to show details of the workload ‘ds1’. In this case, ‘Limits’ is set to protocol_ops = 10.

# isi performance workloads list test
ID   Name  Metric Values           Creation Time       Cluster Resource Impact  Client Impact   Limits
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
100  -     path:/ifs/test/expt_nfs 2023-02-02T12:06:05  -   -  protocol_ops:10
           protocol:nfs3
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 1

Or in ‘view’ mode:

# isi performance workloads view ds1 100
                     ID: 100
                   Name: -
          Metric Values: path:/ifs/test/expt_nfs, protocol:nfs3
          Creation Time: 2023-02-02T12:06:05
Cluster Resource Impact: -
          Client Impact: -
                 Limits: protocol_ops:10

Or from the WebUI, by browsing to Cluster management > Smart QoS:

You can easily modify the limit value of a pinned workload with the following CLI syntax. For example, to set the limit to 100 Ops:

# isi performance workloads modify ds1 100 --limits protocol_ops:100

Or from the WebUI, by browsing to Cluster management > Smart QoS > Edit throttle:

Similarly, you can use the following CLI command to easily remove a protocol ops limit for a pinned workload:

# isi performance workloads modify ds1 100 --no-protocol-ops-limit

Or from the WebUI, by browsing to Cluster management > Smart QoS > Remove throttle:

Author: Nick Trimbee

Among the myriad of new features included in the OneFS 9.5 release is SupportAssist, Dell’s next-gen remote connectivity system. SupportAssist is included with all support plans (features vary based on service level agreement).

Dell SupportAssist rapidly identifies, diagnoses, and resolves cluster issues and provides the following key benefits:

• Improves productivity by replacing manual routines with automated support
• Accelerates resolution, or avoid issues completely, with predictive issue detection and proactive remediation

Within OneFS, SupportAssist transmits events, logs, and telemetry from PowerScale to Dell support. As such, it provides a full replacement for the legacy ESRS.

Delivering a consistent remote support experience across the Dell storage portfolio, SupportAssist is intended for all sites that can send telemetry off-cluster to Dell over the Internet. SupportAssist integrates the Dell Embedded Service Enabler (ESE) into PowerScale OneFS along with a suite of daemons to allow its use on a distributed system.

 Using the Dell Connectivity Hub, SupportAssist can either interact directly or through a Secure Connect gateway. 

SupportAssist has a variety of components that gather and transmit various pieces of OneFS data and telemetry to Dell Support and backend services through the Embedded Service Enabler (ESE). These workflows include CELOG events; In-product activation (IPA) information; CloudIQ telemetry data; Isi-Gather-info (IGI) logsets; and provisioning, configuration, and authentication data to ESE and the various backend services.

SupportAssist requires an access key and PIN, or hardware key, to be enabled, with most customers likely using the access key and pin method. Secure keys are held in key manager under the RICE domain.

In addition to the transmission of data from the cluster to Dell, Connectivity Hub also allows inbound remote support sessions to be established for remote cluster troubleshooting.

 In the next article in this series, we’ll take a deeper look at the SupportAssist architecture and operation.

The SmartQoS Protocol Ops limits architecture, introduced in OneFS 9.5, involves three primary capabilities:

• Resource tracking
• Resource limit distribution
• Throttling

Under the hood, the OneFS protocol heads (NFS, SMB, and S3) identify and track how many protocol operations are being processed through a specific export or share. The existing partitioned performance (PP) reporting infrastructure is leveraged for cluster wide resource usage collection, limit calculation and distribution, along with new OneFS 9.5 functionality to support pinned workload protocol Ops limits.

The protocol scheduling module (LwSched) has a built-in throttling capability that allows the execution of individual operations to be delayed by temporarily pausing them, or ‘sleeping’. Additionally, in OneFS 9.5, the partitioned performance kernel modules have also been enhanced to calculate ‘sleep time’ based on operation count resource information (requested, average usage, and so on) – both within the current throttling window, and for a specific workload.

We can characterize the fundamental SmartQoS workflow as follows:

1. Configuration, using the CLI, pAPI, or WebUI.
2. Statistics gatherer obtains Op/s data from the partitioned performance (PP) kernel.
3. Stats gatherer communicates Op/s data to PP leader service.
4. Leader queries config manager for per-cluster rate limit.
5. Leader calculates per-node limit.
6. PP follower service is notified of per-node Op/s limit.
7. Kernel is informed of new per-node limit.
8. Work is scheduled with rate-limited resource.
9. Kernel returns sleep time, if needed.

When an admin configures a per-cluster protocol Ops limit, the statistics gathering service, isi_stats_d, begins collecting workload resource information every 30 seconds by default from the partitioned performance (PP) kernel on each node in the cluster and notifies the isi_pp_d leader service of this resource info. Next, the leader gets the per-cluster protocol Ops limit plus additional resource consumption metrics from the isi_acct_cpp service from isi_tardis_d, the OneFS cluster configuration service and calculates the protocol Ops limit of each node for the next throttling window. It then instructs the isi_pp_d follower service on each node to update the kernel with the newly calculated protocol Ops limit, plus a request to reset the throttling window.

When the kernel receives a scheduling request for a work item from the protocol scheduler (LwSched), the kernel calculates the required ‘sleep time’ value, based on the current node protocol Ops limit and resource usage in the current throttling window. If insufficient resources are available, the work item execution thread is put to sleep for a specific interval returned from the PP kernel. If resources are available, or the thread is reactivated from sleeping, it executes the work item and reports the resource usage statistics back to PP, releasing any scheduling resources it may own.

SmartQoS can be configured through either the CLI, platform API, or WebUI, and OneFS 9.5 introduces a new SmartQoS WebUI page to support this. Note that SmartQoS is only available when an upgrade to OneFS 9.5 has been committed, and any attempt to configure or run the feature prior to upgrade commit will fail with the following message:

# isi performance workloads modify DS1 -w WS1 --limits protocol_ops:50000
 Setting of protocol ops limits not available until upgrade has been committed

When a cluster is running OneFS 9.5 and the release is committed, the SmartQoS feature is enabled by default. This, and the current configuration, can be confirmed using the following CLI command:

 # isi performance settings view
                   Top N Collections: 1024
        Time In Queue Threshold (ms): 10.0
 Target read latency in microseconds: 12000.0
Target write latency in microseconds: 12000.0
          Protocol Ops Limit Enabled: Yes

In OneFS 9.5, the ‘isi performance settings modify’ CLI command now includes a ‘protocol-ops-limit-enabled’ parameter to allow the feature to be easily disabled (or re-enabled) across the cluster. For example:

# isi performance settings modify --protocol-ops-limit-enabled false
protocol_ops_limit_enabled: True -> False

Similarly, the ‘isi performance settings view’ CLI command has been extended to report the protocol OPs limit state:

# isi performance settings view *
Top N Collections: 1024
Protocol Ops Limit Enabled: Yes

In order to set a protocol OPs limit on workload from the CLI, the ‘isi performance workload pin’ and ‘isi performance workload modify’ commands now accept an optional ‘–limits’ parameter. For example, to create a pinned workload with the ‘protocol_ops’ limit set to 10000:

# isi performance workload pin test protocol:nfs3 --limits
protocol_ops:10000

Similarly, to modify an existing workload’s ‘protocol_ops’ limit to 20000:

# isi performance workload modify test 101 --limits protocol_ops:20000
protocol_ops: 10000 -> 20000

When configuring SmartQoS, always be aware that it is a powerful throttling tool that can be applied to significant areas of a cluster’s data and userbase. For example, protocol OPs limits can be configured for metrics such as ‘path:/ifs’, which would affect the entire /ifs filesystem, or ‘zone_name:System’ which would limit the System access zone and all users within it.

While such configurations are entirely valid, they would have a significant, system-wide impact. As such, exercise caution when configuring SmartQoS to avoid any inadvertent, unintended, or unexpected performance constraints.

To clear a protocol Ops limit on workload, the ‘isi performance workload modify’ CLI command has been extended to accept an optional ‘–noprotocol-ops-limit’ argument. For example:

# isi performance workload modify test 101 --no-protocol-ops-limit
protocol_ops: 20000 -> 18446744073709551615

Note that the value of ‘18446744073709551615’ in the command output above represents ‘NO_LIMIT’ set.

You can view a workload’s protocol Ops limit by using the ‘isi performance workload list’ and ‘isi performance workload view’ CLI commands, which have been modified in OneFS 9.5 to display the limits appropriately. For example:

# isi performance workload list test
ID Name Metric Values Creation Time Impact Limits
---------------------------------------------------------------------
101 - protocol:nfs3 2023-02-02T22:35:02 - protocol_ops:20000
---------------------------------------------------------------------
# isi performance workload view test 101
ID: 101
Name: -
Metric Values: protocol:nfs3
Creation Time: 2023-02-02T22:35:02
Impact: -
Limits: protocol_ops:20000

In the next article in this series, we’ll step through an example SmartQoS configuration and verification from both the CLI and WebUI.

Author: Nick Trimbee

Built atop the partitioned performance (PP) resource monitoring framework, OneFS 9.5 introduces a new SmartQoS performance management feature. SmartQoS allows a cluster administrator to set limits on the maximum number of protocol operations per second (Protocol Ops) that individual pinned workloads can consume, in order to achieve desired business workload prioritization. Among the benefits of this new QoS functionality are:

• Enabling IT infrastructure teams to achieve performance SLAs
• Allowing throttling of rogue or low priority workloads and hence prioritization of other business critical workloads
• Helping minimize data unavailability events due to overloaded clusters

This new SmartQoS feature in OneFS 9.5 supports the NFS, SMB and S3 protocols, including mixed traffic to the same workload.

But first, a quick refresher. The partitioned performance resource monitoring framework, which initially debuted in OneFS 8.0.1, enables OneFS to track and report the use of transient system resources (resources that only exist at a given instant), providing insight into who is consuming what resources, and how much of them. Examples include CPU time, network bandwidth, IOPS, disk accesses, and cache hits, and so on.

OneFS partitioned performance is an ongoing project that in OneFS 9.5 now provides control and insights. This allows control of work flowing through the system, prioritization and protection of mission critical workflows, and the ability to detect if a cluster is at capacity.

Because identification of work is highly subjective, OneFS partitioned performance resource monitoring provides significant configuration flexibility, by allowing cluster admins to craft exactly how they want to define, track, and manage workloads. For example, an administrator might want to partition their work based on criteria such as which user is accessing the cluster, the export/share they are using, which IP address they’re coming from – and often a combination of all three.

OneFS has always provided client and protocol statistics, but they were typically front-end only. Similarly, OneFS has provided CPU, cache, and disk statistics, but they did not display who was consuming them. Partitioned performance unites these two realms, tracking the usage of the CPU, drives, and caches, and spanning the initiator/participant barrier.

OneFS collects the resources consumed and groups them into distinct workloads. The aggregation of these workloads comprises a performance dataset.

The following metrics are tracked by partitioned performance resource monitoring:

Be aware that, in OneFS 9.5, SmartQoS currently does not support the following Partitioned Performance criteria:

When pinning a workload to a dataset, note that the more metrics there are in that dataset, the more parameters need to be defined when pinning to it. For example:

Dataset = zone_name, protocol, username

To set a limit on this dataset, you’d need to pin the workload by also specifying the zone name, protocol, and username.

When using the remote_address and/or local_address metrics, you can also specify a subnet. For example: 10.123.456.0/24

With the exception of the system dataset, you must configure performance datasets before statistics are collected.

For SmartQoS in OneFS 9.5, you can define and configure limits as a maximum number of protocol operations (Protocol Ops) per second across the following protocols:

• NFSv3
• NFSv4
• NFSoRDMA
• SMB
• S3

You can apply a Protocol Ops limit to up to four custom datasets. All pinned workloads within a dataset can have a limit configured, up to a maximum of 1024 workloads per dataset. If multiple workloads happen to share a common metric value with overlapping limits, the lowest limit that is configured would be enforced

Note that when upgrading to OneFS 9.5, SmartQoS is activated only when the new release has been successfully committed.

In the next article in this series, we’ll take a deeper look at SmartQoS’ underlying architecture and workflow.

Author: Nick Trimbee

In the first article in this series, we looked at the architecture and considerations of the new SmartPools transfer limits in OneFS 9.5. Now, we turn our attention to the configuration and management of this feature.

From the control plane side, OneFS 9.5 contains several WebUI and CLI enhancements to reflect the new SmartPools transfer limits functionality. Probably the most obvious change is in the Local storage usage status histogram, where tiers and their child node pools have been aggregated for a more logical grouping. Also, blue limit-lines have been added above each of the storage pools, and a red warning status is displayed for any pools that have exceeded the transfer limit.

Similarly, the storage pools status page now includes transfer limit details, with the 90% limit displayed for any storage pools using the default setting.

From the CLI, the isi storagepool nodepools view command reports the transfer limit status and percentage for a pool. The used SSD and HDD bytes percentages in the command output indicate where the pool utilization is relative to the transfer limit.

The storage transfer limit can be easily configured from the CLI as either for a  specific pool, as a default, or disabled, using the new –transfer-limit and –default-transfer-limit flags.

The following CLI command can be used to set the transfer limit for a specific storage pool:

# isi storagepool nodepools/tier modify --transfer-limit={0-100, default, disabled} 

For example, to set a limit of 80% on an A200 nodepool:

# isi storagepool a200_30tb_1.6tb-ssd_96gb modify --transfer-limit=80 

Or to set the default limit of 90% on tier perf1:

# isi storagepool perf1 --transfer-limit=default 

Note that setting the transfer limit of a tier automatically applies to all its child node pools, regardless of any prior child limit configurations.

The global isi storage settings view CLI command output shows the default transfer limit, which is 90%, but it can be configured between 0 to 100%.

This default limit can be reconfigured from the CLI with the following syntax:

# isi storagepool settings modify --default-transfer-limit={0-100, disabled}

For example, to set a new default transfer limit of 85%:

# isi storagepool settings modify --default-transfer-limit=85

And the same changes can be made from the SmartPools WebUI, by navigating to Storage pools > SmartPools settings:

 Once a SmartPools job has been completed in OneFS 9.5, the job report contains a new field, files not moved due to transfer limit exceeded.

# isi job reports view 1056 
... 
... 
Policy/testpolicy/Access changes skipped 0 
Policy/testpolicy/ADS containers matched 'head’ 0 
Policy/testpolicy/ADS containers matched 'snapshot’ 0 
Policy/testpolicy/ADS streams matched 'head’ 0 
Policy/testpolicy/ADS streams matched 'snapshot’ 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Directories matched 'head’ 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Directories matched 'snapshot’ 0 
Policy/testpolicy/File creation templates matched 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Files matched 'head’ 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Files matched 'snapshot’ 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Files not moved due to transfer limit exceeded 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Files packed 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Files repacked 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Files unpacked 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Packing changes skipped 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Protection changes skipped 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Skipped files already in containers 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Skipped packing non-regular files 0 
Policy/testpolicy/Skipped packing regular files 0

Additionally, the SYS STORAGEPOOL FILL LIMIT EXCEEDED alert is triggered at the Info level when a storage pool’s usage has exceeded its transfer limit. Each hour, CELOG fires off a monitor helper script that measures how full each storage pool is relative to its transfer limit. The usage is gathered by reading from the disk pool database, and the transfer limits are stored in gconfig. If a node pool has a transfer limit of 50% and usage of 75%, the monitor helper would report a measurement of 150%, triggering an alert.

# isi event view 126 
ID: 126 
Started: 11/29 20:32 
Causes Long: storagepool: vonefs_13gb_4.2gb-ssd_6gb:hdd usage: 33.4, transfer limit: 30.0 
Lnn: 0 
Devid: 0 
Last Event: 2022-11-29T20:32:16 
Ignore: No 
Ignore Time: Never 
Resolved: No 
Resolve Time: Never 
Ended: -- 
Events: 1 
Severity: information

And from the WebUI:

And there you have it: Transfer limits, and the first step in the evolution toward a smarter SmartPools.

The new OneFS 9.5 release introduces the first phase of engineering’s Smarter SmartPools initiative, and delivers a new feature called SmartPools transfer limits.

The goal of SmartPools Transfer Limits is to address spill over. Previously, when file pool policies were executed, OneFS had no guardrails to protect against overfilling the destination or target storage pool. So if a pool was overfilled, data would unexpectedly spill over into other storage pools.

An overflow would result in storagepool usage exceeding 100%, and cause the SmartPools job itself to do a considerable amount of unnecessary work, trying to send files to a given storagepool. But because the pool was full, it would then have to send those files off to another storage pool that was below capacity. This would result in data going where it wasn’t intended, and the potential for individual files to end up getting split between pools. Also, if the full pool was on the most highly performing storage in the cluster, all subsequent newly created data would now land on slower storage, affecting its throughput and latency. The recovery from a spillover can be fairly cumbersome because it’s tough for the cluster to regain balance, and urgent system administration may be required to free space on the affected tier.

In order to address this, SmartPools Transfer Limits allows a cluster admin to configure a storagepool capacity-usage threshold, expressed as a percentage, and beyond which file pool policies stop moving data to that particular storage pool.

These transfer limits only take effect when running jobs that apply filepool policies, such as SmartPools, SmartPoolsTree, and FilePolicy.

The main benefits of this feature are two-fold:

• Safety, in that OneFS avoids undesirable actions, so the customer is prevented from getting into escalation situations, because SmartPools won’t overfill storage pools.
• Performance, because transfer limits avoid unnecessary work, and allow the SmartPools job to finish sooner.

Under the hood, a cluster’s storagepool SSD and HDD usage is calculated using the same algorithm as reported by the ‘isi storagepools list’ CLI command. This means that a pool’s VHS (virtual hot spare) reserved capacity is respected by SmartPools transfer limits. When a SmartPools job is running, there is at least one worker on each node processing a single LIN at any given time. In order to calculate the current HDD and SSD usage per storagepool, the worker must read from the diskpool database. To circumvent this potential bottleneck, the filepool policy algorithm caches the diskpool database contents in memory for up to 10 seconds.

Transfer limits are stored in gconfig, and a separate entry is stored within the ‘smartpools.storagepools’ hierarchy for each explicitly defined transfer limit.

Note that in the SmartPools lexicon, ‘storage pool’ is a generic term denoting either a tier or nodepool. Additionally, SmartPools tiers comprise one or more constituent nodepools.

Each gconfig transfer limit entry stores a limit value and the diskpool database identifier of the storagepool to which the transfer limit applies. Additionally, a ‘transfer limit state’ field specifies which of three states the limit is in:

A SmartPools transfer limit does not affect the general ingress, restriping, or reprotection of files, regardless of how full the storage pool is where that file is located. So if you’re creating or modifying a file on the cluster, it will be created there anyway. This will continue up until the pool reaches 100% capacity, at which point it will then spill over.

The default transfer limit is 90% of a pool’s capacity. This applies to all storage pools where the cluster admin hasn’t explicitly set a threshold. Note also that the default limit doesn’t get set until a cluster upgrade to OneFS 9.5 has been committed. So if you’re running a SmartPools policy job during an upgrade, you’ll have the preexisting behavior, which is to send the file to wherever the file pool policy instructs it to go. It’s also worth noting that, even though the default transfer limit is set on commit, if a job was running over that commit edge, you’d have to pause and resume it for the new limit behavior to take effect. This is because the new configuration is loaded lazily when the job workers are started up, so even though the configuration changes, a pause and resume is needed to pick up those changes.

SmartPools itself needs to be licensed on a cluster in order for transfer limits to work. And limits can be configured at the tier or nodepool level. But if you change the limit of a tier, it automatically applies to all of its child nodepools, regardless of any prior child limit configurations. The transfer limit feature can also be disabled, which results in the same spillover behavior OneFS always displayed, and any configured limits will not be respected.

Note that a filepool policy’s transfer limits algorithm does not consider the size of the file when deciding whether to move it to the policy’s target storagepool, regardless of whether the file is empty, or a large file. Similarly, a target storagepool’s usage must exceed its transfer limit before the filepool policy will stop moving data to that target pool. The assumption here is that any storagepool usage overshoot is insignificant in scale compared to the capacity of a cluster’s storagepool.

A SmartPools file pool policy allows you to send snapshot or HEAD data blocks to different targets, if so desired.

Because the transfer limit applies to the storagepool itself, and not to the file pool policy, it’s important to note that, if you’ve got varying storagepool targets and one file pool policy, you may have a situation where the head data blocks do get moved. But if the snapshot is pointing at a storage pool that has exceeded its transfer limit, its blocks will not be moved.

File pool policies also allow you to specify how a mixed node’s SSDs are used: either as L3 cache, or as an SSD strategy for head and snapshot blocks. If the SSDs in a node are configured for L3, they are not being used for storage, so any transfer limits are irrelevant to it. As an alternative to L3 cache, SmartPools offers three main categories of SSD strategy:  

• Avoid, which means send all blocks to HDD 
• Data, which means send everything to SSD 
• Metadata Read or Write, which sends varying numbers of metadata mirrors to SSD, and data blocks to hard disk.

To reflect this, SmartPools transfer limits are slightly nuanced when it comes to SSD strategies. That is, if the storagepool target contains both HDD and SSD, the usage capacity of both mediums needs to be below the transfer limit in order for the file to be moved to that target. For example, take two node pools, NP1 and NP2.

A file pool policy, Pol1, is configured and which matches all files under /ifs/dir1, with an SSD strategy of Metadata Write, and pool NP1 as the target for HEAD’s data blocks. For snapshots, the target is NP2, with an ‘avoid’ SSD strategy, so just writing to hard disk for both snapshot data and metadata.

When a SmartPools job runs and attempts to apply this file pool policy, it sees that SSD usage is above the 85% configured transfer limit for NP1. So, even though the hard disk capacity usage is below the limit, neither HEAD data nor metadata will be sent to NP1.

For the snapshot, the SSD usage is also above the NP2 pool’s transfer limit of 90%.

However, because the SSD strategy is ‘avoid’, and because the hard disk usage is below the limit, the snapshot’s data and metadata get successfully sent to the NP2 HDDs.

Author: Nick Trimbee

PowerScale – the world’s most flexible[1] and cyber-secure scale-out NAS solution[2]  – is powering up the new year with the launch of the innovative OneFS 9.5 release. With data integrity and protection being top of mind in this era of unprecedented corporate cyber threats, OneFS 9.5 brings an array of new security features and functionality to keep your unstructured data and workloads more secure than ever, as well as delivering significant performance gains on the PowerScale nodes – such as up to 55% higher performance on all-flash F600 and F900 nodes as compared with the previous OneFS release.[3]   

OneFS and hardware security features 

New PowerScale OneFS 9.5 security enhancements include those that directly satisfy US Federal and DoD mandates, such as FIPS 140-2, Common Criteria, and DISA STIGs – in addition to general enterprise data security requirements. Multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO) support, data encryption in-flight and at rest, TLS 1.2, USGv6R1 IPv6 support, SED Master Key rekey, plus a new host-based firewall are all part of OneFS 9.5. 

15TB and 30TB self-encrypting (SED) SSDs now enable PowerScale platforms running OneFS 9.5 to scale up to 186 PB of encrypted raw capacity per cluster – all within a single volume and filesystem, and before any additional compression and deduplication benefit.  

Delivering federal-grade security to protect data under a zero trust model 

Security-wise, the United States Government has stringent requirements for infrastructure providers such as Dell Technologies, requiring vendors to certify that products comply with requirements such as USGv6, STIGs, DoDIN APL, Common Criteria, and so on. Activating the OneFS 9.5 cluster hardening option implements a default maximum security configuration with AES and SHA cryptography, which automatically renders a cluster FIPS 140-2 compliant. 

OneFS 9.5 introduces SAML-based single sign-on (SSO) from both the command line and WebUI using a redesigned login screen. OneFS SSO is compatible with identity providers (IDPs) such as Active Directory Federation Services, and is also multi-tenant aware, allowing independent configuration for each of a cluster’s Access Zones. 

Federal APL requirements mandate that a system must validate all certificates in a chain up to a trusted CA root certificate. To address this, OneFS 9.5 introduces a common Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) library to issue, maintain, and revoke public key certificates. These certificates provide digital signature and encryption capabilities, using public key cryptography to provide identification and authentication, data integrity, and confidentiality. This PKI library is used by all OneFS components that need PKI certificate verification support, such as SecureSMTP, ensuring that they all meet Federal PKI requirements. 

This new OneFS 9.5 PKI and certificate authority infrastructure enables multi-factor authentication, allowing users to swipe a CAC or PIV smartcard containing their login credentials to gain access to a cluster, rather than manually entering username and password information. Additional account policy restrictions in OneFS 9.5 automatically disable inactive accounts, provide concurrent administrative session limits, and implement a delay after a failed login.  

As part of FIPS 140-2 compliance, OneFS 9.5 introduces a new key manager, providing a secure central repository for secrets such as machine passwords, Kerberos keytabs, and other credentials, with the option of using MCF (modular crypt format) with SHA256 or SHA512 hash types. OneFS protocols and services may be configured to support FIPS 140-2 data-in-flight encryption compliance, while SED clusters and the new Master Key re-key capability provide FIPS 140-2 data-at-rest encryption. Plus, any unused or non-compliant services are easily disabled.  

On the network side, the Federal APL has several IPv6 (USGv6) requirements that are focused on allowing granular control of individual components of a cluster’s IPv6 stack, such as duplicate address detection (DAD) and link local IP control. Satisfying both STIG and APL requirements, the new OneFS 9.5 front-end firewall allows security admins to restrict the management interface to specified subnet and implement port blocking and packet filtering rules from the cluster’s command line or WebUI, in accordance with federal or corporate security policy. 

Improving performance for the most demanding workloads

OneFS 9.5 unlocks dramatic performance gains, particularly for the all-flash NVMe platforms, where the PowerScale F900 can now support line-rate streaming reads. SmartCache enhancements allow OneFS 9.5 to deliver streaming read performance gains of up to 55% on the F-series nodes, F600 and F900³, delivering benefit to media and entertainment workloads, plus AI, machine learning, deep learning, and more. 

Enhancements to SmartPools in OneFS 9.5 introduce configurable transfer limits. These limits include maximum capacity thresholds, expressed as a percentage, above which SmartPools will not attempt to move files to a particular tier, boosting both reliability and tiering performance. 

Granular cluster performance control is enabled with the debut of PowerScale SmartQoS, which allows admins to configure limits on the maximum number of protocol operations that NFS, S3, SMB, or mixed protocol workloads can consume. 

Enhancing enterprise-grade supportability and serviceability

OneFS 9.5 enables SupportAssist, Dell’s next generation remote connectivity system for transmitting events, logs, and telemetry from a PowerScale cluster to Dell Support. SupportAssist provides a full replacement for ESRS, as well as enabling Dell Support to perform remote diagnosis and remediation of cluster issues. 

Upgrading to OneFS 9.5 

The new OneFS 9.5 code is available on the Dell Technologies Support site, as both an upgrade and reimage file, allowing both installation and upgrade of this new release.  

Author: Nick Trimbee

In addition to the /usr/bin/isi_gather_info tool, OneFS also provides both a GUI and a common ‘isi’ CLI version of the tool – albeit with slightly reduced functionality. This means that a OneFS log gather can be initiated either from the WebUI, or by using the ‘isi diagnostics’ CLI command set with the following syntax:

# isi diagnostics gather start

The diagnostics gather status can also be queried as follows:

# isi diagnostics gather status
Gather is running.

When the command has completed, the gather tarfile can be found under /ifs/data/Isilon_Support.

You can also view and modify the ‘isi diagnostics’ configuration as follows:

# isi diagnostics gather settings view
                Upload: Yes
                  ESRS: Yes
         Supportassist: Yes
           Gather Mode: full
  HTTP Insecure Upload: No
      HTTP Upload Host:
      HTTP Upload Path:
     HTTP Upload Proxy:
HTTP Upload Proxy Port: -
            Ftp Upload: Yes
       Ftp Upload Host: ftp.isilon.com
       Ftp Upload Path: /incoming
      Ftp Upload Proxy:
 Ftp Upload Proxy Port: -
       Ftp Upload User: anonymous
   Ftp Upload Ssl Cert:
   Ftp Upload Insecure: No

The configuration options for the ‘isi diagnostics gather’ CLI command include:

As mentioned above, ‘isi diagnostics gather’ does not present quite as broad an array of features as the isi_gather_info utility. This is primarily for security purposes, because ‘isi diagnostics’ does not require root privileges to run. Instead, a user account with the ‘ISI_PRIV_SYS_SUPPORT’ RBAC privilege is needed in order to run a gather from either the WebUI or ‘isi diagnostics gather’ CLI interface.

When a gather is running, a second instance cannot be started from any other node until that instance finishes. Typically, a warning similar to the following appears:

"It appears that another instance of gather is running on the cluster somewhere. If you would like to force gather to run anyways, use the --force-multiple-igi flag. If you believe this message is in error, you may delete the lock file here: /ifs/.ifsvar/run/gather.node."

You can remove this lock as follows:

# rm -f /ifs/.ifsvar/run/gather.node

You can also initiate a log gather from the OneFS WebUI by navigating to Cluster management > Diagnostics > Gather:

The WebUI also uses the ‘isi diagnostics’ platform API handler and so, like the CLI command, also offers a subset of the full isi_gather_info functionality.

A limited menu of configuration options is also available in the WebUI, under Cluster management > Diagnostics > Gather settings:

Also contained within the OneFS diagnostics command set is the ‘isi diagnostics netlogger’ utility. Netlogger captures IP traffic over a period of time for network and protocol analysis.

Under the hood, netlogger is a Python wrapper around the ubiquitous tcpdump utility, and can be run either from the OneFS command line or WebUI.

For example, from the WebUI, browse to Cluster management > Diagnostics > Netlogger:

Alternatively, from the OneFS CLI, the isi_netlogger command captures traffic on the interface (‘–interfaces’) over a timeout period of minutes (‘–duration’), and stores a specified number of log files (‘–count’).

Here’s the basic syntax of the CLI utility:

 # isi diagnostics netlogger start
        [--interfaces <str>]
        [--count <integer>]
        [--duration <duration>]
        [--snaplength <integer>]
        [--nodelist <str>]
        [--clients <str>]
        [--ports <str>]
        [--protocols (ip | ip6 | arp | tcp | udp)]
        [{--help | -h}]

Note that using the ‘-b’ bpf buffer size option will temporarily change the default buffer size while netlogger is running.

To display help text for netlogger command options, specify 'isi diagnostics netlogger start -h'. The command options include:

Netlogger’s log files are stored by default under /ifs/netlog/<node_name>.

You can also use the WebUI to configure the netlogger parameters under Cluster management > Diagnostics > Netlogger settings:

Be aware that specifying ‘isi diagnostics netlogger’ can consume significant cluster resources. When running the tool on a production cluster, be aware of the effect on the system.

When the command has completed, the capture file(s) are stored under:

# /ifs/netlog/[nodename]

You can also use the following command to incorporate netlogger output files into a gather_info bundle:

# isi_gather_info -n [node#] -f /ifs/netlog

To capture on multiple nodes of the cluster, you can prefix the netlogger command by the versatile isi_for_array utility. For example:

# isi_for_array –s ‘isi diagnostics netlogger --nodelist 2,3 --timeout 5 --snaplength 256’

This command syntax creates five minute incremental files on nodes 2 and 3, using a snaplength of 256 bytes, which captures the first 256 bytes of each packet. These five-minute logs are kept for about three days. The naming convention is of the form netlog-<node_name>-<date>-<time>.pcap. For example:

# ls /ifs/netlog/tme_h700-1
netlog-tme_h700-1.2022-09-02_10.31.28.pcap

When using netlogger, set the ‘–snaplength’ option appropriately, depending on the protocol, in order to capture the right amount of detail in the packet headers and/or payload. Or, if you want the entire contents of every packet, use a value of zero (‘–snaplength 0’).

The default snaplength for netlogger is to capture 320 bytes per packet, which is typically sufficient for most protocols.

However, for SMB, a snaplength of 512 is sometimes required. Note that depending on a node’s traffic quantity, a snaplength of 0 (that is: capture whole packet) can potentially overwhelm the network interface driver.

All the output gets written to files under /ifs/netlog directory, and the default capture time is ten minutes (‘–duration 10’).

You can apply filters to constrain traffic to/from certain hosts or protocols. For example, to limit output to traffic between client 10.10.10.1 and the cluster node:

# isi diagnostics netlogger --duration 5 --snaplength 256 --clients 10.10.10.1

Or to capture only NFS traffic, filter on port 2049:

# isi diagnostics netlogger --ports 2049

Author: Nick Trimbee

The previous blog outlining the investigation and troubleshooting of OneFS deadlocks and hang-dumps generated several questions about OneFS logfile gathering. So it seemed like a germane topic to explore in an article.

The OneFS ‘isi_gather_info’  utility has long been a cluster staple for collecting and collating context and configuration that primarily aids support in the identification and resolution of bugs and issues. As such, it is arguably OneFS’ primary support tool and, in terms of actual functionality, it performs the following roles:

1. Executes many commands, scripts, and utilities on cluster, and saves their results
2. Gathers all these files into a single ‘gzipped’ package.
3. Transmits the gather package back to Dell, using several optional transport methods.

By default, a log gather tarfile is written to the /ifs/data/Isilon_Support/pkg/ directory. It can also be uploaded to Dell using the following means:

More specifically, the ‘isi_gather_info’ CLI command syntax includes the following options:

When the gather arrives at Dell, it is automatically unpacked by a support process and analyzed using the ‘logviewer’ tool.

Under the hood, there are two principal components responsible for running a gather. These are:

The ‘isi_gather_info’ utility is primarily written in Python, with its configuration under the purview of MCP, and RPC services provided by the isi_rpc_d daemon.

For example:

# isi_gather_info&
# ps -auxw | grep -i gather
root   91620    4.4  0.1 125024  79028  1  I+   16:23        0:02.12 python /usr/bin/isi_gather_info (python3.8)
root   91629    3.2  0.0  91020  39728  -  S    16:23        0:01.89 isi_rpc_d: isi.gather.minion.minion.GatherManager (isi_rpc_d)
root   93231    0.0  0.0  11148   2692  0  D+   16:23        0:00.01 grep -i gather

The overlord uses isi_rdo (the OneFS remote command execution daemon) to start up the minion processes and informs them of the commands to be executed by an ephemeral XML file, typically stored at /ifs/.ifsvar/run/<uuid>-gather_commands.xml. The minion then spins up an executor and a command for each entry in the XML file.

The parallel process executor (the default one to use) acts as a pool, triggering commands to run in parallel until a specified number are running in parallel. The commands themselves take care of the running and processing of results, checking frequently to ensure that the timeout threshold has not been passed.

The executor also keeps track of which commands are currently running, and how many are complete, and writes them to a file so that the overlord process can display useful information. When this is complete, the executor returns the runtime information to the minion, which records the benchmark file. The executor will also safely shut itself down if the isi_gather_info lock file disappears, such as if the isi_gather_info process is killed.

During a gather, the minion returns nothing to the overlord process, because the output of its work is written to disk.

Architecturally, the ‘gather’ process comprises an eight phase workflow:

The details of each phase are as follows:

Because the isi_gather_info tool is primarily intended for troubleshooting clusters with issues, it runs as root (or compadmin in compliance mode), because it needs to be able to execute under degraded conditions (that is, without GMP, during upgrade, and under cluster splits, and so on). Given these atypical requirements, isi_gather_info is built as a stand-alone utility, rather than using the platform API for data collection.

The time it takes to complete a gather is typically determined by cluster configuration, rather than size. For example, a gather on a small cluster with a large number of NFS shares will take significantly longer than on large cluster with a similar NFS configuration. Incremental gathers are not recommended, because the base that’s required to check against in the log store may be deleted. By default, gathers only persist for two weeks in the log processor.

On completion of a gather, a tar’d and zipped logset is generated and placed under the cluster’s /ifs/data/IsilonSupport/pkg directory by default. A standard gather tarfile unpacks to the following top-level structure:

# du -sh *
536M    IsilonLogs-powerscale-f900-cl1-20220816-172533-3983fba9-3fdc-446c-8d4b-21392d2c425d.tgz
320K    benchmark
 24K    celog_events.xml
 24K    command_line
128K    complete
449M    local
 24K    local.log
 24K    nodes_info
 24K    overlord.log
 83M    powerscale-f900-cl1-1
 24K    powerscale-f900-cl1-1.log
119M    powerscale-f900-cl1-2
 24K    powerscale-f900-cl1-2.log
134M    powerscale-f900-cl1-3
 24K    powerscale-f900-cl1-3.log

In this case, for a three node F900 cluster, the compressed tarfile is 536 MB in size. The bulk of the data, which is primarily CLI command output, logs, and sysctl output, is contained in the ‘local’ and individual node directories (powerscale-f900-cl1-*). Each node directory contains a tarfile, varlog.tar, containing all the pertinent logfiles for that node.

The root directory of the tarfile file includes the following:

Notable contents of the ‘local’ directory (all the cluster-wide commands that are executed on the node running the gather) include:

Contents of the directory for the ‘node’ directory include:

As the isi_gather_info command runs, status is provided in the interactive CLI session:

# isi_gather_info
Configuring
    COMPLETE
running local commands
    IN PROGRESS \
Progress of local
[########################################################  ]
147/152 files written  \
Some active commands are: ifsvar_modules_jobengine_cp, isi_statistics_heat, ifsv
ar_modules

When the gather has completed, the location of the tarfile on the cluster itself is reported as follows:

# isi_gather_info
Configuring
    COMPLETE
running local commands
    COMPLETE
running node commands
    COMPLETE
collecting files
    COMPLETE
generating package_info.xml
    COMPLETE
tarring gather
    COMPLETE
uploading gather
    COMPLETE

The path to the tar-ed gather is:

/ifs/data/Isilon_Support/pkg/IsilonLogs-h5001-20220830-122839-23af1154-779c-41e9-b0bd-d10a026c9214.tgz

If the gather upload services are unavailable, errors are displayed on the console, as shown here:

…
uploading gather
    FAILED
        ESRS failed - ESRS has not been provisioned
        FTP failed - pycurl error: (28, 'Failed to connect to ftp.isilon.com port 21 after 81630 ms: Operation timed out')

Author: Nick Trimbee

As we’ve seen in prior articles in this series, OneFS and the PowerScale platforms support a variety of Ethernet speeds, cable and connector styles, and network interface counts, depending on the node type selected. However, unlike the back-end network, Dell Technologies does not specify particular front-end switch models, allowing PowerScale clusters to seamlessly integrate into the data link layer (layer 2) of an organization’s existing Ethernet IP network infrastructure. For example:

A layer 2 looped topology, as shown here, extends VLANs between the distribution/aggregation switches, with spanning tree protocol (STP) preventing network loops by shutting down redundant paths. The access layer uplinks can be used to load balance VLANs. This distributed architecture allows the cluster’s external network to connect to multiple access switches, affording each node similar levels of availability, performance, and management properties.

Link aggregation can be used to combine multiple Ethernet interfaces into a single link-layer interface, and is implemented between a single switch and a PowerScale node, where transparent failover or switch port redundancy is required. Link aggregation assumes that all links are full duplex, point to point, and at the same data rate, providing graceful recovery from link failures. If a link fails, traffic is automatically sent to the next available link without disruption.

Quality of service (QoS) can be implemented through differentiated services code point (DSCP), by specifying a value in the packet header that maps to an ‘effort level’ for traffic. Because OneFS does not provide an option for tagging packets with a specified DSCP marking, the recommended practice is to configure the first hop ports to insert DSCP values on the access switches connected to the PowerScale nodes. OneFS does however retain headers for packets that already have a specified DSCP value.

When designing a cluster, the recommendation is that each node have at least one front-end interface configured, preferably in at least one static SmartConnect zone. Although a cluster can be run in a ‘not all nodes on the network’ (NANON) configuration, where feasible, the recommendation is to connect all nodes to the front-end network(s). Additionally, cluster services such as SNMP, ESRS, ICAP, and auth providers (AD, LDAP, NIS, and so on) prefer that each node have an address that can reach the external servers.

In contrast with scale-up NAS platforms that use separate network interfaces for out-of-band management and configuration, OneFS traditionally performs all cluster network management in-band. However, PowerScale nodes typically contain a dedicated 1Gb Ethernet port that can be configured for use as a management network by ICMP or iDRAC, simplifying administration of a large cluster. OneFS also supports using a node’s serial port as an RS-232 out-of-band management interface. This practice is highly recommended for large clusters. Serial connectivity can provide reliable BIOS-level command line access for on-site or remote service staff to perform maintenance, troubleshooting, and installation operations.

SmartConnect provides a configurable allocation method for each IP address pool:

The default ‘static’ allocation assigns a single persistent IP address to each interface selected in the pool, leaving additional pool IP addresses unassigned if the number of addresses exceeds the total interfaces.

The lowest IP address of the pool is assigned to the lowest Logical Node Number (LNN) from the selected interfaces. The same is true for the second-lowest IP address and LNN, and so on. If a node or interface becomes unavailable, this IP address does not move to another node or interface. Also, when the node or interface becomes unavailable, it is removed from the SmartConnect zone, and new connections will not be assigned to the node. When the node is available again, SmartConnect automatically adds it back into the zone and assigns new connections.

By contrast, ‘dynamic’ allocation divides all available IP addresses in the pool across all selected interfaces. OneFS attempts to assign the IP addresses as evenly as possible. However, if the interface-to-IP address ratio is not an integer value, a single interface might have more IP addresses than another. As such, wherever possible, ensure that all the interfaces have the same number of IP addresses.

In concert with dynamic allocation, dynamic failover provides high availability by transparently migrating IP addresses to another node when an interface is not available. If a node becomes unavailable, all the IP addresses it was hosting are reallocated across the new set of available nodes in accordance with the configured failover load-balancing policy. The default IP address failover policy is round robin, which evenly distributes IP addresses from the unavailable node across available nodes. Because the IP address remains consistent, irrespective of the node on which it resides, failover to the client is transparent, so high availability is seamless.

The other available IP address failover policies are the same as the initial client connection balancing policies, that is, connection count, throughput, or CPU usage. In most scenarios, round robin is not only the best option but also the most common. However, the other failover policies are available for specific workflows.

The decision on whether to implement dynamic failover depends on the protocol(s) being used, general workflow attributes, and any high-availability design requirements:

Assigning each workload or data store to a unique IP address enables OneFS SmartConnect to move each workload to one of the other interfaces. This minimizes the additional work that a remaining node in the SmartConnect pool must absorb and ensures that the workload is evenly distributed across all the other nodes in the pool.

Static IP pools require one IP address for each logical interface within the pool. Because each node provides two interfaces for external networking, if link aggregation is not configured, this would require 2*N IP addresses for a static pool.

Determining the number of IP addresses within a dynamic allocation pool varies depending on the workflow, node count, and the estimated number of clients that would be in a failover event. While dynamic pools need, at a minimum, the number of IP addresses to match a pool’s node count, the ‘N * (N – 1)’ formula can often prove useful for calculating the required number of IP addresses for smaller pools. In this equation, N is the number of nodes that will participate in the pool.

For example, a SmartConnect pool with four-node interfaces, using the ‘N * (N – 1)’ model will result in three unique IP addresses being allocated to each node. A failure on one node interface will cause each of that interface’s three IP addresses to fail over to a different node in the pool. This ensures that each of the three active interfaces remaining in the pool receives one IP address from the failed node interface. If client connections to that node are evenly balanced across its three IP addresses, SmartConnect will evenly distribute the workloads to the remaining pool members. For larger clusters, this formula may not be feasible due to the sheer number of IP addresses required.

Enabling jumbo frames (Maximum Transmission Unit set to 9000 bytes) typically yields improved throughput performance with slightly reduced CPU usage than when using standard frames, where the MTU is set to 1500 bytes. For example, with 40 Gb Ethernet connections, jumbo frames provide about five percent better throughput and about one percent less CPU usage.

OneFS provides the ability to optimize storage performance by designating zones to support specific workloads or subsets of clients. Different network traffic types can be segregated on separate subnets using SmartConnect pools.

For large clusters, partitioning the cluster’s networking resources and allocating bandwidth to each workload can help minimize the likelihood that heavy traffic from one workload will affect network throughput for another. This is particularly true for SyncIQ replication and NDMP backup traffic, which can frequently benefit from its own set of interfaces, separate from user and client IO load.

The ‘groupnet’ networking object is part of OneFS’ support for multi-tenancy. Groupnets sit above subnets and pools and allow separate Access Zones to contain distinct DNS settings.

The management and data network(s) can then be incorporated into different Access Zones, each with their own DNS, directory access services, and routing, as appropriate.

Author: Nick Trimbee

A key decision for performance, particularly in a large cluster environment, is the type and quantity of nodes deployed. Heterogeneous clusters can be architected with a wide variety of node styles and capacities, to meet the needs of a varied data set and a wide spectrum of workloads. These node styles encompass several hardware generations, and fall loosely into three main categories or tiers. While heterogeneous clusters can easily include many hardware classes and configurations, the best practice of simplicity for building clusters holds true here too.

Consider the physical cluster layout and environmental factors, particularly when designing and planning a large cluster installation. These factors include:

• Redundant power supply
• Airflow and cooling
• Rackspace requirements
• Floor tile weight constraints
• Networking requirements
• Cabling distance limitations

The following table details the physical dimensions, weight, power draw, and thermal properties for the range of PowerScale F-series all-flash nodes:

Note that the table above represents individual nodes. A minimum of three similar nodes are required for a node pool.

Similarly, the following table details the physical dimensions, weight, power draw, and thermal properties for the range of PowerScale chassis-based platforms: