Question about starting with one server and adding more when ready

Hello FoundationDB community,

I would like to ask if it’s possible to start with just one server (being aware of the risks), working with it (saving and working with data) and, later, add another server (or two, three), changing the cluster configuration and operation mode.

Yup, this should mostly “just work”. For minimal downtime you would want to add enough machines to satisfy your desired replication policy before configuring it. You also want to add enough coordinators. This might look something like this:

  1. Start with single ssd on one machine
  2. Add two more machines
  3. Confirm they’ve joined the cluster with fdbcli --exec status (You should see 3 machines)
  4. configure double ssd in fdbcli (change config to tolerate loss of up to one machine)
  5. coordinators auto in fdbcli (add enough coordinators for your replication policy)
  6. Confirm fault tolerance is 1 with fdbcli --exec status
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Thank you Andrew for your detailed response!