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. In the Create storage cluster window, enter a name for the cluster. The cluster name may only contain Latin letters (a-z, A-Z), numbers (0-9), and hyphens ("-"). It must start with a letter and end with a letter or number.

3. Enable disk encryption for tiers. You can also enable it later.

4. Select one node to create the storage cluster from, and then click Next.

5. In the next window, check the default disk configuration. If it is correct, proceed to create the storage cluster.

   Also, you can assign roles to your disks manually or use Disk actions to work with the disks.

6. Once you finish configuring the disks, click Create, to create the storage cluster.

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. In the Join node to storage cluster window, check the default disk configuration. If it is correct, proceed to join the node to the storage cluster.

   Also, you can assign roles to your disks manually or use Disk actions to work with the disks. Alternatively, you can copy the disk configuration from another node by clicking Copy configuration from and selecting the desired node.

4. Once you finish configuring the disks, click Join, to add the node to the storage cluster.

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.