Deciding whether to install GPFS and deploy protocols manually or with the spectrumscale installation toolkit

Starting with IBM Spectrum Scale™ 4.1.1 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, you can install GPFS™ and deploy protocols either manually or using the spectrumscale installation toolkit.

Why would I want to use the spectrumscale installation toolkit?
While planning your installation, consider the advantages provided by the spectrumscale installation toolkit. The installation toolkit:
  1. Simplifies GPFS cluster creation
  2. Automatically creates NSD and file system stanza files
  3. Creates new NSDs, file systems, and adds new nodes
  4. Has a single package manager for all components of a release
  5. Deploys Object, SMB, NFS by automatically pulling in all pre-requisites
  6. Configures file and Object authentication during deployment
  7. Consistently sets and syncs time on all nodes
  8. Deploys the Spectrum Scale GUI
  9. Configures Performance Monitoring consistently across all nodes
  10. Simplifies upgrade with a single command to upgrade all components on all nodes.
Note: The spectrumscale installation toolkit supports installation, deployment, and upgrading of both IBM Spectrum Scale Standard Edition and IBM Spectrum Scale Advanced Edition.

The toolkit does not install, deploy, or upgrade packages specific to the IBM Spectrum Scale Advanced Edition. They need to be done manually after the spectrumscale installation toolkit is done. The edition level will be Standard until the manual installation is complete and IBM Spectrum Scale is restarted.