Finalizing and Launching a Cluster

Go to Clusters and click Launch Cluster.

Select your template from the Cluster Template drop-down menu and name your cluster.

To create a new template, see Creating a Template.

Name the cluster.

Select whether the Cluster Manager communicates with transfer nodes over a public network or a private network.

Configure DNS for transfer nodes.

The cluster manages DNS "A" (address) records that it keeps up-to-date periodically according to the set of current cluster nodes and their states. It manages two types of records: one for "All nodes" of the cluster and another for "Available transfer nodes".

The record for "Available transfer nodes" contains the IP addresses of cluster nodes used for initiating new transfers. This excludes any nodes that have reached their maximum transfer capacity or nodes that are in an error state. Aspera clients use this record's DNS name to execute data transfers with the cluster.

The record for "All nodes" contains the IP addresses of all cluster nodes, regardless of their current state. Other Aspera applications like IBM Aspera Shares or IBM Aspera Faspex are configured with this name.

For both of these record types, there are two variants which either use the nodes' public IP addresses or their private IPs. Public IPs are used if the cluster should be available from outside of its VPC; private IPs are needed for access within the VPC.

The Name and Hosted Zone fields are combined to build the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) for each configuration. For example, if the desired FQDN aspera-cluster.example.org, use the configuration represented by the table below:

Type	Name	Hosted Zone	Hosted Zone ID
Available transfer nodes / public IPs	aspera_cluster	example.org.	Z3798DMNHF7N5I
Available transfer nodes / private IPs	aspera_cluster	example.org.	Z20Y3CXFK4N2BN

You can specify either the Hosted Zone or the Hosted Zone ID. If you provide the Hosted Zone ID, the Cluster Manager ignores the Hosted Zone and retrieves the Hosted Zone from the Route 53 service. If, however, you have several hosted zones with the same name, you must specify the Hosted Zone ID.The Hosted Zone ID can be found in the Route 53 dashboard. From the AWS Console, go to Networking > Route 53 and select Hosted Zones from the left sidebar. For example, in the table above, the public and private IPs share the same FQDN (aspera-cluster.example.org) but have different Hosted Zone IDs to differentiate them.

Note: The Hosted Zone must end with a dot (.) .

Adjust the auto-scaling policy to fit your criteria.

For more information about the auto-scaling policy, see Configuring the Auto Scaling Policy.

Enter your customer ID and your entitlement ID to validate your license.

Review the Provider Configuration and Transfer Configuration sections.

If you need to use a firstboot script to customize your nodes, enter your script into the Firstboot Script field.

You can customize your transfer nodes by specifying a first-boot script when launching the cluster. This script is run before all other first-boot scripts. For more information on using first-boot scripts, see Customizing Cluster Nodes Using the Custom First-boot Scripts.

Click Launch Cluster.