How to start a job in the EMC Isilon OneFS Job Engine

Optimizing free space on your Isilon cluster.

Scanning the file system to ensure that data is protected.

Removing duplicate data.

These are examples of cluster maintenance tasks that are managed by the Job Engine, a work distribution service in the EMC Isilon OneFS operating system.

The Job Engine plays an important role in maintaining the reliability and integrity of your cluster, and is well documented on the EMC Online Support site. It’s also a popular feature with customers, as indicated by our recent poll results.

This post provides a brief overview of the Job Engine and a video demonstration of how to start a job.

Job Engine basics

The Job Engine prioritizes, schedules, and balances the amount of resources dedicated to a specific set of tasks, or jobs, that run in the background. Specifically, the Job Engine distributes job segments—broken into phases and tasks—across the nodes in your Isilon cluster. For a list of cluster maintenance jobs that are managed by the Job Engine, see the OneFS administration guides or the knowledgebase article titled OneFS 5.0 – 7.0: Complete list of jobs by OneFS version. (Log in to the EMC Online Support site to view this article and OneFS administration guides.)

You can review the schedule of jobs and monitor the progress of running jobs in the OneFS web administration interface or command-line interface. Because some jobs can take many hours to complete or consume a significant amount of resources while running, you can also manually start, pause, or stop jobs. If a job is paused, you can restart the job at any time from the point at which it was interrupted.

In OneFS versions 6.0.x through 7.0.x, only one job can run at a time in the background. In OneFS 7.1, up to three jobs can run at the same time (with a few exceptions to keep similar types of jobs from interfering with each other). Each job has a default impact policy and priority to determine when it will run. You can also modify these default settings when you start a job.

How to start a job

If you want to start a job before it is scheduled to run automatically, you can start it manually. This basic procedure for OneFS 6.0.x through 7.0.x is described in the following video.

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To start a job in OneFS 7.1, go to Cluster Management > Job Operations > Job Types click More (circled in red below), and then click Start Job.

How to start a job in Isilon OneFS 7.1

How to start a job in OneFS 7.1.

Additional details about the Job Engine in OneFS 7.1 can be found in the recently updated white paper titled EMC Isilon OneFS: A Technical Overview.

Are you looking for more specific information about job management in OneFS? Let us know. Send an email to isi.knowledge@emc.com, or post a comment on this blog.

About the Author: Kirsten Gantenbein