DellEMC EHC – ‘Onboarding A Local Cluster’ (Part 2)

David Ring FEHC , , ,

The following two-part post details how to add an Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) vSphere Local Cluster, in EHC terms we refer to this cluster type as LC1S (Local Copy on One Site).

There are a number of prerequisites required in advance of running the Onboard Cluster workflow in EHC, namely:

  • Add a Site
  • Add a vCenter
  • Add a Hardware Island

Part 1 addresses the first two prerequisites (Add a Site, Add a vCenter):

DellEMC EHC – ‘Onboarding A Local Cluster’ (Part 1)

The following Part 2 post details how to:

  • Add a Hardware Island
  • Run the Onboard Local Cluster workflow in EHC

Adding A Hardware Island

An EHC hardware island is a set of compute, network and storage resources belonging to one vCenter for example a hardware island may consist of  subset of resources on one VxBlock, a vCenter can accommodate multiple hardware islands. A hardware island can support multiple vSphere clusters. A ViPR vArray can only be associated with a single hardware island. For further information on the EHC hardware island please refer to the EHC Concepts & Architecture Guide.

Begin by logging into the EHC tenant portal as the system administrator with entitlements to the EHC Maintenance catalog items. Navigate to: Catalog -> EHC Configuration -> Hardware Island Maintenance:

EHCCreateHW1 Continue reading →

DellEMC VxBlock – Cisco UCS Ethernet Adapter Policy

David Ring Cisco, Vblock , ,

The following details the creation of a VxBlock Cisco UCS ‘Ethernet Adapter Policy’ for a compute B-Series blade running VMware ESXi. This policy is leveraged by a service-profile which gets associated with their respective compute blades.

Note: This guidance is based on vSphere 6.0

UCS Manager GUI

  1. From the UCS Manager GUI click on ‘Servers’ and navigate to Policies->root->Adapter Policies.
  2. Chose the option to ‘Add’ a new Ethernet Adapter Policy and provide a name & description (e.g VMQ-Default).ucs_eth_adpt_policy3
  3. Under Resources enter the following settings:

Continue reading →

DellEMC EHC – ViPR vPool Volume Migration

David Ring FEHC, ViPR , ,

This post details the procedure and EHC validation steps to execute in order to move an EHC ViPR provisioned volume to a different ViPR virtual pool leveraging the ViPR Change Virtual Pool services.

High level steps that will need to be followed:

  • Create a new ViPR vPool with all identical properties except for one that you are changing (Best to use the duplicate button and then modify the copy).
  • Migrate ViPR Volume(s) to the newly created vPool using ViPR workflow.
  • Delete old ViPR vPool.
  • Rename the newly created ViPR vPool to the ‘Old pool name’

Renaming the new vPool with the old name results in a successful EHC StaaS provisioning task utilizing the original SRP. Continue reading →

DellEMC EHC – ‘Onboarding A Local Cluster’ (Part 1)

David Ring FEHC , , ,

The following two-part post details how to add an Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) vSphere Local Cluster, in EHC terms we refer to this cluster type as LC1S (Local Copy on One Site) other EHC cluster types include:

VS1S – vSAN Storage on One Site (not used by STaaS)
CA1S – CA VPLEX Metro Storage on One Site
CA2S – CA VPLEX Metro Storage across Two Sites
DR2S – DR RecoverPoint Storage across Two Sites

For details on how to add other cluster types please refer to the EHC Admin Guide:

ENTERPRISE HYBRID CLOUD 4.1.2 Administration Guide

There are a number of prerequisites required in advance of running the Onboard Cluster workflow in EHC, namely:

  • Add a Site
  • Add a vCenter
  • Add a Hardware Island

Part 1 will address the first two prerequisites (Add a Site, Add a vCenter).

The below flowchart details nicely what is required in terms of prerequisites and is provided for throughout the EHC Admin Guide for the various cluster types (thanks @LifeOfBrianOC):

AddSiteFlow1

Note: this post provides an example and does not substitute for the EHC Admin Guide. Continue reading →

Dell EMC ViPR 3.6 – VMAX Export Path Adjustment

David Ring ViPR , , , , ,

A very useful new feature in ViPR 3.6 is the ability to increase/decrease the number of fibre channel paths on an existing VPLEX or VMAX export (host/cluster). The following example showcases the ability to increase the path count for a VMAX backed ViPR Export Group.

Note: If you want to adjust the path for an export where there are pre-existing masking
views for a host or cluster in the export group, first ingest any volumes exported to
the host. Example ViPR Ingest Procedure.

As can be seen from the following screen captures the export group consists of 2x ESXi hosts with each host having 2x initiators and each host presently configured for 1x FC path per initiator, as part of this example we will double the total fc paths per host from 2 to 4.

Export Group named ‘EHC’ details:

ViPRExpandPaths0

Continue reading →

Dell EMC – Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) 4.1.2

David Ring FEHC , , , , , , ,

EHC LOGO

EHC (Enterprise Hybrid Cloud) which is the DellEMC turnkey VMware (vRealize Suite) based cloud offering has made great strides in recent releases transforming the cloud strategy for CPSD CI/HCI, namely EHC on VxBlock/VxRack Flex/VxRail (Engineered, manufactured, managed, supported and sustained as one product) and this release is no different with massive improvements around automation especially in relation to both the Install and Upgrade process associated with the EHC platform on VxRail leading to far quicker and more seamless deployments of the EHC stack. Enhanced multi-site capabilities, DRaaS offering on VxRail and factory delivered EHC on VxRack Flex w/NSX are some of the biggest milestones with this release. Continue reading →