Creating the storage cluster

Now that you have created the management and secondary nodes and configured networking, you can proceed to create the storage cluster.

1. Open the Infrastructure > Nodes screen, and then click Create storage cluster.

2. To configure the disk roles or node location, click the cogwheel icon.

3. Enter a name for the cluster. It may only contain Latin letters (a-z, A-Z), numbers (0-9), and hyphens (“-“).
4. Enable encryption, if required.
5. Click Create.

You can monitor cluster creation on the Infrastructure > Nodes screen. The creation might take some time, depending on the number of disks to be configured. Once the configuration is complete, the cluster is created.

To add a secondary node, do the following:

1. On the Infrastructure > Nodes screen, click an unassigned node.
2. On the node right pane, click Join to cluster.
3. Click Join to assign the roles to disks automatically and add the node to the default location. Alternatively, click the cogwheel icon to configure the disk roles or node location.

For the evaluation scenario, you need to assign a node’s storage disks to various tiers (refer to Understanding storage policies). For each node, assign SSDs to tier 2, and HDDs to tier 3.