Did you ever install an Isilon cluster, connect all the cables and run through the configuration wizard, only to find out you still can’t connect to the cluster? Sure you did, happens to everyone. Maybe the cluster only has one 10GigE port online while the network team is still scrambling for 10GigE modules. Or maybe you have configured the invalid VLAN tag on the subnet. This post will group some of the more useful Isilon network commands, so you can enable VLAN tagging or add additional ports to the pool via the CLI.

Enabling Isilon network VLAN tagging (IEEE 802.1Q)

You’ll usually have more than one VLAN active on your Isilon cluster, especially if you have a multi tenancy environment with more than one customer or department accessing your Isilon. This means that your switch ports will have to be in trunk mode instead of access mode. It also means that you will have to add the correct VLAN tag to the Isilon subnet configuration. If you don’t and the switchports don’t have a native VLAN configured, the switch will simply drop your traffic.

If you’ve forgotten to add a VLAN tag to the Isilon network configuration during the wizard, do not fret: there’s a CLI command for that! First of all, list the available subnets with isi networks list subnets. If it’s a brand spanking new Isilon, there’s probably just subnet0.

Next up, enable VLAN tagging and specify the correct VLAN with the following command (in this example I’m configuring VLAN 333):
isi networks modify subnet –name subnet0 –enable-vlan –vlan-id 333

Rerunning the isi networks list subnets command will not show you the configured VLAN; instead you need to add the –verbose switch to the command.

Should you need to disable VLAN tagging because you’re connecting to access ports on a switch, use the following command:
isi networks modify subne –name subnet0 –disable-vlan

Adding Isilon network interfaces to a pool

After the initial configuration just the first external network interface of the node will be added to the default subnet0 pool. For a node with two 10GigE interfaces, that’s 10gige-1. If you’ve accidentally cabled in the 2nd port, you can now swap cables or just add the second port to the pool as well. In our case we didn’t have full network redundancy yet as we ran out of 10GigE ports and they will be added in the coming weeks.

First of all, list the network interfaces with isi networks list interfaces.

You can see two interfaces are up but they don’t have a pool membership and thus do nothing. I could have connected to the cluster over the .132 address on node 2, but with the serial cable already attached… meh.

If you’re unsure to what pool you need to add the interfaces, you can list these pools with isi networks list pools. In our case the interfaces need to be added to subnet0:pool0, as you can already see in the membership of the interfaces. So let’s do that with the following command:
isi networks modify pool –name subnet0:pool0 –add-ifaces 1-3:10gige-2
The format of the –add-ifaces parameter is <nodes>:<interface>, with the possibility to specify node ranges and/or individual nodes, plus several interfaces at once. So for example: –add-ifaces 1-3,5,7:ext-1,ext-2 to add the two 1GigE interfaces on node 1,2,3,5,7.

List the interfaces again and it should all look a lot better.