In this video, we walk you through the initial configuration of PowerFlex Manager, preparing it to deploy a PowerFlex cluster. Learn how to change the default admin password, enable SupportAssist, upload compliance files, configure networking, add credentials, and discover resources. Follow along for a comprehensive guide to setting up your PowerFlex environment efficiently.
In the previous video, we walked through one scenario for deploying PowerFlex Manager. In this video, we will work through the initial configuration of PowerFlex Manager as we make it ready to deploy a PowerFlex cluster. The first configuration task is changing the default admin password. After entering the default password, you will be required to choose a new strong password. After successfully logging in, you'll be greeted with the Initial Configuration Wizard. Choose whether to enable SupportAssist. You can always come back and do this later.
Then indicate whether you are deploying a new instance of PowerFlex as we are in this demo, or whether you will import an existing PowerFlex cluster of some sort. After the summary, click finish to continue. The Getting Started page provides a series of tasks for configuring the system. We're going to start with uploading a compliance file whether their RCMS for PowerFlex Rack or ICS for PowerFlex Appliance. These compliance files contain files for firmware and software that will enable a known good configuration state.
While these files can be downloaded from Dell Remote Support Services, they may also be staged and added from a local network share, as we have done for this demo. We will upload an IC file for we are doing an appliance type deployment. When adding a new compliance file to the system, choose whether to make it the new default version for compliance checking. It takes a while to download and unpack the compliance file. In the meantime, we can add a compatibility file. Compatibility files are used for checking upgrade paths from the current state to the next desired compliance file.
We'll speed through the download and synchronization process. As software defined infrastructure, perhaps the most important thing that we configure is the networking. We need to configure the management network VLAN, the data networks, the networks for hardware management and hypervisor management. And we'll go ahead and configure both management and data networks for file services. Now that we have all our networks defined let's add credentials.
We need to provide the resource credentials for the nodes and switches we want to discover and add. We also need to add credentials for vCenter instances and for any operating systems or hypervisors we plan to configure and use. Now that we have the credentials saved in the system, let's go discover our switches and add them to our resources. We provide the IP range where PowerFlex Manager should look for the switches and tell it to use the credentials we just added. After a minute, the switches will appear and our resources list. Next we will discover and add our node resources.
Again we will specify the IP range where our nodes exist. For now, we'll set them in reserved mode and use the saved node credentials. Notice this time that when the nodes appear in our resources list, they are marked as non-compliant. This means that something about them is out of compliance with our specified IC or Intelligent catalog. Clicking on one of the non-compliant labels brings up a compliance report for that node, and we can see that indeed, we have some network firmware that is out of date.
Before we go any further, let's select all of the nodes until PowerFlex Manager to update the resources with the correct firmware. Updating the firmware on the nodes takes quite a long time. So once again, let's speed things up to get through it. The final thing we will do is import operating system and hypervisor images.
These are used during the template based deployment process. ICs don't always include the PowerFlex embedded Linux OS, but we will import that along with an ESXi image. We now have all the pieces we need to configure a template and use it to deploy a PowerFlex storage cluster and compute clusters. We will do that in the next video.
