Getting Started with Clients
The default CF stack will not deploy any client machines in your environment. In order to test the functionalities and performance of your AWS-based Lightbits cluster, you will therefore need to deploy an AWS instance with an operating system that supports NVMe over TCP via the adequate nvme_tcp kernel module.
Such distributions include:
- AlmaLinux 9
- RHEL 9
- Rocky Linux 9
- Ubuntu 22.04
- Ubuntu 20.04
- VMWare ESXI 7.0.3 (also requires a VCP plugin)
- Linux distribution with kernel version 5.4 and newer
Make sure your kernel version has a fully functional nvme_tcp kernel module (note that AWS-provided AMIs usually do not have this kernel module). Lightbits recommends kernel version 5.4 and above.
The following is an example of a sequence of preparations to test client connectivity:
- Connect to one of your storage instances using Session Manager (or SSH).
- Get the system JWT token (see the JWT section for additional information).
- lbcli List Nodes for status.
- Create a test volume using lbcli Create Volume.
- Create a client instance within the same VPC as the storage cluster or a different VPC (with VPC tunnel between them).
- Connect to the client using SSH/SSM.
- Connect and load the nvme module Discovery-Client Command.
- Descover the volume with discovery service Discovery-client Deployment via the NLB (Load Balancer) URL.
At this point you will have a block device on your client. You can create a file system on it and mount the drive, or use it as a raw block device. You can also run a FIO R/W test (Flexible IO is a tool for benchmarking and workload simulation on IO devices).