Hello, my name is Curt. I am a Senior Principal Engineer working with the Dell GSE Support Team. This video is dedicated to demonstrating how to configure an Azure Stack HCI Non-Converged Network as defined in the Dell EMC Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Network Integration and Host Network Configurations Options Reference Guide. We'll use PowerShell to set up our networks, network switch, and configure VLANs.
The following demonstration is only one example of how to set up an Azure Stack non-converged network and does not include the cluster node configuration. More non-converged network configurations are available in the Dell EMC solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI guide. Azure stack HCI non-converged networks are based on the idea that management network or server client network communication and storage RDMA traffic are based on having separate networks running over their own physical network connections.
The management and storage network traffic is not consolidated to virtual adapters running on the same physical network card hardware. We're also using a Switch Enable Team or SET team for the management network in our demo, but this is not a requirement when configuring non-converged Azure stack HCI networks.
In our demo we configure the individual management and storage networks, configure a switch-enabled team for the management network, and follow that up with VLAN tagging to isolate the network traffic. So, let's move over to our demo server. We're going to start out by running a command of ‘get-netadapter’.
When we run that we see we have multiple q logic connections here and of these connections we have a couple of gigabit connections we have two 10 gigabit ethernet connections and we have two QLogic 25 gigabit adapter devices. I've decided to create a management set for our Switch Enable Team using the two 10 gigabit connections.
That will be our network for Windows domain server and client network connections. These connections show up with the name NIC1 and NIC2. The storage networks in our Azure HCI network configuration will be the 2 QLogic 25 gigabit connection devices, and I'm using that configuration choice to ensure our s2d cluster has the highest performing network cards dedicated to the RDMA traffic needed between cluster nodes. Next let's go into the script that we're using. The first part of our script involves setting variables that will be referenced when performing the actual configuration of the SET team VM virtual adapter in VLANs.
Starting at the top we see the setting for the management adapter in switch information. The management switch is simply going to be called ‘Management’. We also specify connections we're using, which are NIC1 and NIC2, and the name of our virtual adapter that we'll later see in Hyper-V which is called ‘Management’. The IP information for a virtual adapter is also specified in our script, and after that completes, we have the configuration for our storage adapters. These are going to be the QLogic 25 gigabit connections that we're using for this one. They're listed as ‘SLOT 4 PORT 1’, and ‘SLOT 4 PORT 2’.
We're also specifying the IP and VLAN information that's going to be used by these connections, and of course we also have to specify the subnet mask. Once again all of this is being done through a PowerShell script. Now after that runs we create the VM switch, that will be calling all the variables that we've set above, and all the IP information for this connection also will be specified. After that completes, we're going to go ahead and configure our storage adapters.
Once again, all the syntax here is referring back to variable information that we've set in order to complete the configuration of our storage networks and the VLANs, they're going to be tagged for them. All right, so let's go ahead and get going here. The first part of this, once again, is setting all the variables that we're going to use for our management network and for our storage networks, so let's just go ahead and copy all that information. So, we're running that through PowerShell, don't see any problems with any of that up to this point so all the variable information has been set. Next, we're going to actually create our virtual switch, we're creating that SET team that we referenced, we're going to go ahead and paste that in, and there's the creation of our SET team. All right, so we're going to go ahead and hit enter, and this is the configuration of all that IP information that we specified in the variable section of our script.
Now at this point we have set up our SET switch and we set up everything for the management network that we need the last thing that we're going to run is the configuration of the storage networks once again this is using our 25 gigabit connections it's the rest of the script so let's go ahead and pull that out. Okay there's a configuration of our storage, and I want to make sure that all that's completed. All right, so, all the IP information should be assigned to the storage networks that we specified, now what we want to do at this point is just confirm what we believe that we've configured. So, we're going to run that ‘get-netadapter’ command again, and so one of the big things that we want to see here is that ‘vEthernet (Management)’ network, that is the virtual adapter that is utilizing the SET team that we set up with those 10 gigabit ethernet connections. Next, we want to check out our network configuration, and we're going to do that by bringing up all our network connections. So that's that connection that we saw, let's go ahead and just take a look, going through our GUI interface here to confirm that all the IP information is set and that's what we wanted to put on our management network.
We had to define our default gateway for this particular connection and also our DNS server in order to communicate with our Active Directory environment. Let's also take a look at our storage networks, so we know the storage information is there, IP information is set. We're confirming that our second subnet is also configured for our storage network so everything that we ran in our PowerShell script is showing up as set up and configured.
One last thing that we want to take a look at here is we want to confirm that in Hyper-V we see that virtual switch that we configured, so in Virtual Switch Manager we are seeing the switch that we configured which is called ‘Management’ and we're also seeing VLAN information that we wanted to specify as well.
So, everything is set up as we expected. That concludes our demo on configuring an Azure Stack HCI Non-Converged Network for cluster management and storage network communication.  .
Thank you for watching.
