Aside from the following points, setting up a storage node is no different from setting up any other compute node:
- The storage node should be assigned the “storage” role. This role will allow the node to act as an NFS server.
- To prevent the possibility of your data on the storage node being overwritten at reboot, you should set the node’s “datanode” property to be “yes”. You can also set the node’s installmode to be “nosync”.
- Put your OS data on a separate drive from the drives used for storage. Subsequently, add those storage drives as fsmounts instead of adding them to the disk setup of the node or its category so that the node-installer never touches or checks them.
- Add the mount points of those fsmounts to the various exclude lists for the node.
- To even further prevent the possibility of your data on the storage node being overwritten at reboot, you can set the node’s installboot record property to “yes” to have the node boot from local disk instead of the head node. Along with this, you would also change the boot order in the BIOS of the node, so that it boots from disk first before attempting to PXE boot.