Create a File System

You can create a file system and mount it to multiple servers. Then the servers can share this file system. You can create three types of file systems: SFS Capacity-Oriented, SFS Turbo, and General Purpose File System.

Prerequisites

A VPC is available.
If no VPC is available, create one by referring to Creating a VPC in the Virtual Private Cloud User Guide.
ECSs are available and are in the available VPC.
If no ECSs are available, buy ECSs by referring to Purchasing an ECS and Logging In to an ECS.
Creating SFS Turbo file systems depends on the following services: VPC, Billing Center, DSS, and ECS. Ensure that required roles or policies have been configured.
- The permissions of the SFS Turbo FullAccess policy already include the permissions of VPC FullAccess, which are required for creating file systems. An IAM user assigned the SFS Turbo Full Access policy does not need to have the VPC FullAccess policy assigned explicitly.
- To create yearly/monthly file systems, the BSS Administrator policy is required.
- To create file systems in dedicated projects, the DSS FullAccess and ECS FullAccess policies are required.

Logging In to the Management Console

Visit the Huawei Cloud website.
Register an account.

Before using SFS, you need to register a HUAWEI ID. This account can be used to access all Huawei Cloud services, including SFS. If you already have an account, start from 3.
1. In the upper right corner of the page, click Sign Up.
2. Complete the registration as instructed.
  After the registration is complete, you will be redirected to your personal information page.
Log in to the management console.
1. In the upper right corner of the displayed page, click Console.
2. Enter the username and password as prompted, and click Sign In.
In the upper left corner of the page, select the region where the service is located from the drop-down list.
Choose Storage > Scalable File Service to go to the SFS console.
(Recommended) Top up your account and subscribe to SFS, so that the service can be used properly. To purchase SFS, see How Do I Purchase SFS?

Creating an SFS Capacity-Oriented File System

In the upper right corner of the page, click Create File System.

Set the parameters described in Table 1, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Creating a file system

**Table 1** Parameter description
Parameter	Description	Remarks
File System Type	Select SFS Capacity-Oriented or SFS Turbo.	Select SFS Capacity-Oriented.
Region	Mandatory Region of the tenant. Select the region from the drop-down list in the upper left corner of the page.	You are advised to select the region where the ECSs reside.
AZ	A geographical area with an independent network and an independent power supply.	You are advised to select the AZ where the ECSs reside.
Protocol Type	The supported protocols include NFS (NFSv3 only) and CIFS. NFS is suitable for Linux ECSs, and CIFS is suitable for Windows ECSs.	Select NFS or CIFS based on your need.
VPC	An ECS cannot access file systems in a different VPC. Select the VPC to which the ECS belongs. NOTE: By default, all ECSs in a VPC have the same permissions. You can modify the VPC in the future. Only one VPC can be added when a file system is created. After a file system is created, you can add multiple authorized VPCs for the file system by referring to Configuring Multi-VPC Access.	Click View VPC to view existing VPCs or create a new one.
Maximum Capacity	Maximum capacity allowed for a single file system. When the used capacity of a file system reaches this value, no more data can be written to the file system. You need to expand the file system.	The value ranges from 1 GB to 512,000 GB.
Encryption	Optional Specifies whether a file system is encrypted. You can create an encrypted or non-encrypted file system, but you cannot change the encryption settings of an existing file system. If Encryption is selected, the following parameters will be displayed: Create Agency If the KMS access rights are not granted to SFS Capacity-Oriented, this button will be displayed. Otherwise, this button will not be displayed. Click Create Agency to grant SFS Capacity-Oriented the permissions to access KMS. The system automatically creates an agency and names it SFSAccessKMS. When SFSAccessKMS is displayed for Agency Name, the KMS access rights have been granted to SFS Capacity-Oriented, and SFS Capacity-Oriented can obtain KMS keys for encrypting or decrypting the file system. After the rights are granted, follow-up operations do not need granting rights again. Agency Name Agency: An agency is a trust relationship between two tenants or services. A tenant can create an agency to grant resource access rights to another tenant or service. SFSAccessKMS: If Agency Name is SFSAccessKMS, SFS Capacity-Oriented is granted the KMS access rights to use custom keys to encrypt or decrypt file systems. KMS key name NOTE: KMS key name is displayed only after the agency named SFSAccessKMS has been created. For details, see Create Agency above. KMS key name is the identifier of the key, and you can use KMS key name to specify the KMS key that is to be used for encryption. You can select one of the following keys: Default key: After the KMS access rights have been granted to SFS Capacity-Oriented, the system automatically creates a default key and names it sfs/default. Custom key: Existing or newly created custom keys. For details, see Creating a Custom Key in the Data Encryption Workshop User Guide. NOTE: Before you use the encryption function, the KMS access rights must be granted to SFS Capacity-Oriented. If you have the right to grant the permission, grant SFS the permissions to access KMS directly. Otherwise, you need to contact the system administrator to obtain the "Security Administrator" rights first. For details, see File System Encryption.	-
Name	User-defined name of the file system. If you create more than one file system at a time, a name suffix is added to each file system name automatically. For example, if you set the name to sfs-name for two new file systems, the two file system names will be sfs-name-001 and sfs-name-002.	The name can contain only letters, digits, underscores (_), and hyphens (-). When creating one file system, enter a maximum of 255 characters. When creating multiple file systems, enter 1 to 251 characters.
Quantity	Number of file systems to be created	Each cloud account can have a total of 512,000 GB for its file systems and a maximum of 10 file systems created, one by one or in a batch. If the quantity or total capacity of the file systems you are creating exceeds the upper limit, click Increase quota to apply for a higher quota.

Click Create Now.
Confirm the file system information and click Submit.
Go back to the file system list.

If the status of the created file system is Available, the file system is created successfully. If the status is Creation failed, contact the administrator.

Creating a General Purpose File System

In the upper right corner of the page, click Create File System.

Set the parameters as shown in Figure 2. Table 2 describes the parameters.

Figure 2 Creating a file system

**Table 2** Parameter description
Parameter	Description	Remarks
Region	Mandatory Region of the tenant. Select the region from the drop-down list in the upper left corner of the page.	Select the region where the ECSs and VPC endpoint reside.
AZ	A geographical area with an independent network and an independent power supply.	You are advised to select the AZ where the ECSs reside.
Name	User-defined name of the file system. Must be globally unique. It cannot be the same as the name of any existing general purpose file system, including one created by the current user or any other user. And it cannot be changed after the file system is created. If a general purpose file system is deleted, you can only create a general purpose file system with the same name as the deleted one 30 minutes after that file system has been deleted.	The name can contain only letters, digits, underscores (_), and hyphens (-). When creating one file system, enter a maximum of 255 characters. When creating multiple file systems, enter 1 to 251 characters.
Protocol Type	Only NFSv3 is supported currently.	-
VPC	Select the IAM project to which the target VPC belongs and then select the target VPC. What Is an IAM Project? Select the VPC where the ECSs and VPC endpoint reside. An ECS cannot access a file system belonged to a different VPC. Select the VPC where your ECSs reside. You can add authorized VPCs later on the file system details page.	-
Tag	Optional When creating a file system, you can add tags to it. Tags help you identify file systems, and you can classify and search for file systems by tag. Tags are composed of key-value pairs. Key: mandatory. A tag key can contain a maximum of 128 characters. It can contain letters, digits, and spaces representable in UTF-8 and special characters (_.:=+-@). It cannot start or end with a space and cannot be left empty. Tag keys starting with _sys_ are system tags, and you cannot start a tag key with _sys_. Value: optional. A tag value can contain a maximum of 255 characters. It can contain letters, digits, and spaces representable in UTF-8 and special characters (_.:=+-@) and can be left empty. It cannot start or end with a space.	You can add a maximum of 20 tags to a file system. The tag keys of the same file system must be unique. Except for tagging the file system during file system creation, you can also add, modify, or delete tags for existing file systems.
Purchase Resource Packages	Optional You can select this parameter and then a desired resource package. The resource package takes effect immediately after payment. For details about resource packages, see Resource Packages.	A resource package can only be used to pay for the storage capacity used by general purpose file systems in the same region. Any usage in excess of the package quota will be billed in the pay-per-use mode. Only available in the CN-Hong Kong region.

Click Create Now.
Confirm the file system information and click Submit.
Go back to the file system list.

If the file system is displayed in the list, it is successfully created. If the file system status is Creation failed, submit a service ticket.

Figure 3 General purpose file system created

Creating an SFS Turbo File System

In the navigation pane on the left, choose SFS Turbo. In the upper right corner of the page, click Create File System.

Set the parameters, as shown in Figure 4. Table 3 describes the parameters.

Figure 4 Creating an SFS Turbo file system

**Table 3** Parameter description
Parameter	Description	Remarks
Billing Mode	Mandatory Select a billing mode, Yearly/Monthly or Pay per use. For details about the billing standards, see Price Details.	-
Region	Mandatory Region of the tenant. Select the region from the drop-down list in the upper left corner of the page.	You are advised to select the region where the servers reside.
AZ	Mandatory A geographical area with an independent network and an independent power supply.	There is certain performance loss when a file system is accessed from a different AZ. You are advised to select the AZ where your servers reside.
Type	Mandatory Includes SFS Turbo Standard and SFS Turbo Performance. For more information, see File System Types.	Select Standard. NOTE: After a file system is created, its flavor cannot be changed. If you want to change the flavor, you need to create another file system. Plan the file system flavor in advance.
Capacity	Maximum capacity allowed for a single file system. When the used capacity of a file system reaches this value, no more data can be written to the file system. You need to expand the file system. The capacity of an SFS Turbo file system cannot be decreased. Set an appropriate file system capacity based on your service needs.	Supported range: SFS Turbo Standard: 500 GB to 32 TB SFS Turbo Performance: 500 GB to 32 TB
Protocol Type	Mandatory SFS Turbo supports NFS for file system access.	The default value is NFS.
VPC	Mandatory Select a VPC and its subnet. VPC: A server cannot access file systems in a different VPC. Select the VPC to which the server belongs. Subnet: A subnet is a unique IP address range in a VPC. A subnet provides dedicated network resources that are logically isolated from other networks for network security. NOTE: To achieve the optimal network performance, select the VPC where your cloud servers reside. You can also use VPC peering connections to connect two or more VPCs to share files between VPCs. When a file system is accessed across VPCs, the latency as well as the bandwidth and IOPS loss may be high. Therefore, intra-VPC access is recommended. For details about VPC peering connections, see VPC Peering Connection.	-
Security Group	Mandatory A security group functions as a virtual firewall and provides secure network access control policies for file systems. You can define access rules for a security group to protect the file systems in this security group. When creating an SFS Turbo file system, you can select only one security group. You are advised to use an independent security group for an SFS Turbo file system to isolate it from service nodes. The normal access and use of an SFS Turbo file system are affected by the rules configured for its security group. For details about how to configure a security group rule, see Adding a Security Group Rule. After an SFS Turbo file system is created, the system automatically enables the security group ports required by the NFS protocol. This ensures that the SFS Turbo file system can be successfully mounted to your servers. The inbound ports required by the NFS protocol are ports 111, 2049, 2051, 2052, and 20048. If you need to change the enabled ports, go to the VPC console, choose Access Control > Security Groups, locate the target security group, and change the ports.	-
Encryption	Optional Specifies whether a file system is encrypted. You can create an encrypted or non-encrypted file system, but you cannot change the encryption settings of an existing file system. If Encryption is selected, the following parameters will be displayed: KMS key name KMS key name is the identifier of the key, and you can use KMS key name to specify the KMS key that is to be used for encryption. Select an existing key from the drop-down list, or click View KMS List to create a new key. For details, see Creating a CMK in the Data Encryption Workshop User Guide. KMS key ID After you select a key name, the system automatically generates a key ID.	-
Tag	Optional When creating a file system, you can add tags to it. Tags help you identify file systems, and you can classify and search for file systems by tag. Tags are composed of key-value pairs. Key: Mandatory if the file system is going to be tagged. A tag key can contain a maximum of 36 characters. It cannot start or end with spaces or start with _sys_. It can contain letters, digits, spaces, and the following characters: _.:=+-@ Value: Optional if the file system is going to be tagged. It can be an empty character string. A tag value can contain a maximum of 43 characters. It cannot start or end with spaces. It can contain letters, digits, spaces, and the following characters: _.:/=+-@ NOTE: You can add a maximum of 20 tags to a file system. The tag keys of the same file system must be unique. Except for tagging the file system during file system creation, you can also add, modify, or delete tags for existing file systems. If your organization has enabled the tag policy type for SFS and has a tag policy attached, you must comply with the tag policy rules when creating file systems, otherwise file systems may fail to be created. Contact the organization administrator to learn more about tag policies.	-
Automatic Backup	Cloud Backup and Recovery (CBR) provides backup protection for SFS Turbo and allows you to use backup data to create SFS Turbo file systems. After you configure backup, the system will associate the SFS Turbo file system with the backup vault and apply the selected policy to the vault to periodically back up the file system. The following options are available, among which the default value is Do not use: Buy new: Enter a vault name, which can contain a maximum of 64 characters, including letters, digits, underscores (_), and hyphens (-), for example, vault-f61e. The default naming rule is vault_xxxx. Enter a vault capacity, which is required for backing up SFS Turbo file systems. The vault capacity cannot be less than the size of file systems, so enter a value ranging from the total size of the associated file systems to 10,485,760 in the unit of GB. Select a backup policy from the drop-down list, or log in to the CBR console and configure a desired one. Use existing: Select an existing backup vault from the drop-down list. Select a backup policy from the drop-down list, or log in to the CBR console and configure a desired one. Do not use: Skip this configuration if backup is not required. If you need backup protection after a file system has been purchased, log in to the CBR console, locate the desired vault, and associate the file system with the vault.	-
Name	Mandatory User-defined name of the file system.	The name can contain only letters, digits, and hyphens (-). It must contain more than four characters but no more than 64 characters.

Click Create Now.
Confirm the file system information and click Submit.
Complete the creation and go back to the file system list.

If the status of the created file system is Available, the file system is created successfully. If the status is Creation failed, contact the administrator.