PowerScale OneFS Web Administration Guide

Subnets

Subnets are networking containers that enable you to sub-divide your network into smaller, logical IP networks.

On a cluster, subnets are created under a groupnet and each subnet contains one or more IP address pools. Both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are supported on OneFS; however, a subnet cannot contain a combination of both. When you create a subnet, you specify whether it supports IPv4 or IPv6 addresses.

You can configure the following options when you create a subnet:

• Gateway servers that route outgoing packets and gateway priority.
• Maximum transmission unit (MTU) that network interfaces in the subnet will use for network communications.
• SmartConnect service address, which is the IP address on which the SmartConnect module listens for DNS requests on this subnet.
• VLAN tagging to allow the cluster to participate in multiple virtual networks.
• Direct Server Return (DSR) address, if your cluster contains an external hardware load balancing switch that uses DSR.

How you set up your external network subnets depends on your network topology. For example, in a basic network topology where all client-node communication occurs through direct connections, only a single external subnet is required. In another example, if you want clients to connect through both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, you must configure multiple subnets.