As your workload changes, you can expand your cluster to improve its query performance, system availability, and fault tolerance. Expanding a cluster adds more nodes to the cluster. During an expansion, you can also change the replication factor of your cluster.
TigerGraph must already be installed on the new nodes in exactly the same version as the cluster.
No loading jobs, queries, or REST requests are running on the new node or the cluster.
Obtain a few key measures for the state of your data before the expansion, such as vertex counts/edge counts or certain query results. This will be useful in verifying data integrity after the expansion completes.
If the original cluster is a single node installation, make sure the IP used is not a local loopback address such as 127.0.0.1.
Before running any commands to expand a cluster, make sure you have a clear idea of how the new cluster should be distributed. You should have the following information:
The new replication factor of the cluster
The new partitioning factor of the cluster
The IP addresses of the new nodes to be added to the cluster
To expand the cluster, run the gadmin cluster expand
command like below. If the expansion involves changing the replication factor, use the --ha
option to indicate the new replication factor:
node_ip_list
is the machine aliases of the nodes you are adding to the cluster mapped to their IP addresses with a colon(:
), and separated by a comma. Below is an example:
We suggest naming the new nodes following the convention of m<serial>
, such as m1
, m2
, and m3
for a 3-node cluster. If you are adding a fourth node, then the fourth node would be named m4
. If you decide to name them differently, make sure that all names are unique within the cluster.
Extra disk space is required during cluster expansion. If more space is not available on the same disk, you can supply a staging location on a different disk to hold temporary data:
If you choose to supply a staging location, make sure that the TigerGraph Linux user has write permission to the path you provide. The overall amount of space required for expansion on each node is (1 + Math.ceil(oldPartition/newPartition) ) * dataRootSize
. oldPartition
and newPartition
each stand for the partitioning factor of the cluster before and after expansion; dataRootSize
stands for the size of the data root folder on the node.
For example, if you are expanding from a 6 node cluster with a replication factor of 2 and a partitioning factor of 3, to a 10-node cluster with a replication factor of 2 and a partitioning factor of 5, and the size of the data root folder on a node is 50GB. Then you would need more than (1 + Math.ceil(3/5)) * 50) = 100 GB
of free space on the staging path.
When the expansion completes, you should see a message confirming the completion of the cluster change. The message will also include the location of the temporary files created during the expansion.
Verify data integrity by comparing vertex/edge counts or query results. After confirming a successful expansion, delete the temporary files to free up disk space.