Dell FluidFS Version 6.0 FS8600 Appliance Pre-Deployment Requirements

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SAN and Internal Network for Fibre Channel Appliances

The following prerequisites apply to Fibre Channel with 1GbE appliances and Fibre Channel with 10GbE appliances.

Fibre Channel SAN Fabric

Make sure the Fibre Channel SAN fabric is ready for deployment.

■	Prerequisite
□	Fibre Channel switches can be reached from the rack. At least one switch must be available to connect the FluidFS cluster to the Storage Center. An FS8600 appliance cannot be connected directly to a Storage Center. For high availability, deploy two switches (one for each Storage Center fault domain).
□	Fibre Channel switch infrastructure has four ports available for each FS8600 appliance (all four ports must be connected).

Internal Network for Multi-Appliance Clusters

The following prerequisites apply to FluidFS clusters that contain multiple FS8600 appliances. In single-appliance FluidFS clusters, the internal network ports are connected directly to each other, so no switch prerequisites apply.

■	Prerequisite
□	1GbE or 10GbE switches can be reached from the rack in a multi-appliance configuration. Although the best practice is to isolate internal and client traffic on separate physical networks, it is possible to use the same switch and use separate logical networks by configuring VLANs.
□	Switch infrastructure has sufficient ports available Fibre Channel with 1GbE appliance – Eight RJ45 connections for each appliance Fibre Channel with 10GbE appliance – Four LC optical fiber or SFP+ (twinax) connections for each appliance
□	Flow Control is enabled on the switches.
□	Unicast storm control is disabled on the switches.
□	Jumbo frames are enabled on the switches to support a frame size of 9000 bytes. Dell PowerConnect and Force10 switches must be configured to 9216 MTU. Switches from vendors other than Dell might require a different MTU configuration to accept 9000-byte frames.
□	Switches allow multicast between all ports connected to FS8600 appliances.
□	IPv6 is enabled on the switch ports connected to FS8600 appliances. IPv6 link-local addressing is used for internal network communication. Routing of IPv6 traffic is not required on the internal network switches.
□	IGMP and/or MLD snooping are disabled on the switch ports connected to FS8600 appliances.
□	All switch ports connected to FS8600 appliances are set as edge ports or PortFast to skip Spanning Tree negotiation.