EMC Isilon commands

Essential Dell EMC Isilon Storage Commands You Should Know

Dell EMC Isilon is a powerful scale-out NAS solution widely used for high-performance and scalable storage needs. Managing Isilon efficiently often means mastering its robust command-line interface. In this blog, we’ll walk you through some of the most useful Isilon commands to help you manage your cluster, network, storage devices, exports, and quotas.
Managing the Isilon Cluster

Change a User Password: To update the password for a user (for example, the root user), use the following command:

isi auth user modify --user=root --password=Login4Emc-123

Monitor the health status of Isilon boot drives with this series of commands that parse SMART data and life expectancy:

isi_for_array -s 'isi_radish -a /dev/ad[3,4,7] | grep -E "^Internal.|Lifetime Left|Life Remain|^Carrier board."' | awk -F '[(]' '{ if(match($0,"Life")) { printf "%s%d%s\n"," Life remaining: ","0x" substr($2,15,2),"%" } else { printf ("%s%s%s",substr($0,0,match($0,":")-1)," ",substr($0,match($0,"/")-2,6)) } }'

Alternatively, another command for detailed life percentage info:

isi_for_array -s isi_radish -a /dev/ad*|egrep 'SN:|Percent Life'|grep -v Used|sed -e 's/Percent Life Remaining:/PercentLifeRemaining %/' -e 's/Percent Lifetime Left:/PercentLifeRemaining %/' -e 's/is .*//'|awk '{print $1,$2,$3, sprintf("%d","0x"$8 )}'|sed -e 's/% 0/%0/' -e 's/ 0//'

To bulk clear resolved events from the cluster:

isi event groups bulk --resolved true

Isilon allows you to manage network interfaces grouped into pools for different workloads such as NFS or SMB. Some key commands are:

Add interfaces to a network pool

isi network pools modify groupnet0.VLAN10.NFS --add-ifaces=10:10gige-1

Remove interfaces from a network pool:

isi network pools modify groupnet0.VLAN10.NFS --remove-ifaces=2:10gige-1

Rebalance all smartconnect network pools to optimize traffic distribution

isi network sc-rebalance-all

Disk and Device Management

To format a disk on a specific node

isi devices format  --node-lnn=

To add a disk to a node

isi devices add  --node-lnn=

Managing NFS Exports: Add Clients to an Existing Export
Suppose you want to grant root, read-write, and general clients access to an export

isi nfs exports modify --id=34 --add-root-clients=10.234.76.145,10.234.76.146 --add-read-write-clients=10.234.76.145,10.234.76.146 --add-clients=10.234.76.145,10.234.76.146

Modifying Export Quotas: Adjust the quota settings on a directory path, such as setting a hard threshold of 2TB

isi quota quotas modify --path=/ifs/data/systemexport --hard-threshold=2T --type=directory

Conclusion
These Dell EMC Isilons CLI commands are essential for daily administration and maintenance of your Isilon cluster. Familiarizing yourself with them will help streamline management tasks from user administration to disk operations and network optimizations. Stay tuned for more in-depth guides on Isilon management! Isilon

If you’d like me to expand on any specific section or add examples and best practices, just let me know in the comment section.