Hello everyone, my name is Brian, and I am a Global Support Engineer with Dell who specializes in modular systems and the MX7000 chassis. Today, we are going to cover how to create identity pools. These are used to define virtual network identities when performing template-based server deployments.
At the moment, I am on a landing page of a two-chassis group, logged in as root with chassis administrator privileges. To create and manage identity pools, you will need at least template management privileges. To start, we go to the 'Configuration' drop-down here and go to 'Identity Pools'. From here, we hit the 'Create' button to create a new identity pool. I’m going to call this 'Test Pool'.
We can define Ethernet, iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, as well as Fibre Channel. For the technologies here, you define your starting virtual MAC address and the number of virtual MACs that you would like in your pool. We do accept a couple of different formats; you can use colons, hyphens, and dots. We’ll hit Next and we’ll do the same for the other three. I do have a call out for iSCSI.
In addition to being able to configure your qualified name prefix as well as the initiator IP pool, there is a requirement that your servers need to run in UEFI boot mode. You will not be able to define iSCSI MAC addresses if your servers are running in BIOS. For additional information on this page or any other pages here, you can go to the question mark button at the top right.
This opens your online help, and it is page-specific. So here, this shows the identity pool for iSCSI, and this is the specific note I just called out. So after we define the virtual MAC addresses, it does a cursory check to make sure that your MAC addresses are not overlapping each other in the pool. This can cause network interruption and conflicts. I do want to also show that 2001 and 2000 are provided before the MAC addresses for your port names and your node names.
This is the error that you would see if the MAC addresses were overlapping. So we want to go to your iSCSI here, and this is actually the same MAC address that is being used for Ethernet. So I’ll just go ahead and change that, and now everything passed. You get an “Identity Pool Created Successfully” message, and you can see your test pool here. We have the starting MAC address and how many iterations are in the pool.
Now, this pool is not used right now, so the usage is going to be blank. The next step would be to associate server templates with the identity pool that you just created. In your network section, we do have a secondary identity pool that is in use at the moment, so I can show you what it looks like when MAC addresses are used.
Here, we have a small identity pool that only defines Ethernet, but under usage, we can see that one server in slot three of the chassis named 'Lead Chassis' has four MAC addresses, and we can see the individual ports that these MAC addresses are assigned to. And that is it for this video. I hope it was helpful, and thank you for taking the time to watch.
