PowerFlex Manager: Partial Network Automation Requirements

PowerFlex Manager has a feature called Partial Network Automation (PNA) which allows you to perform switchless automated deployment of PowerFlex nodes. This feature is fully supported for PowerFlex Appliance customers. PowerFlex Rack customers must contact support to get an Impact Assessment submitted to use this option.

If you choose to use this feature, you give up the error handling and network automation features that are available with Full Network Automation. You must ensure that the switches are configured correctly, since PowerFlex Manager does not be able to configure the switches. If your switch configuration is incorrect, the deployment may fail and the error messaging is limited since we do not have a full view of the network configuration. You must manually add all the interfaces and ports as you would when deploying with Full Network Automation. The OS installation/PXE network is not required as we use virtual media instead for these types of deployments. The switch port configuration must be set to Port Channel (LACP Enabled) and the LACP failback or LACP ungroup option must be configured on the port channels.

There are customer switch port configuration examples in the PowerFlex Appliance Administration Guide here.

Requirements to use Partial Network Automation:

This information is taken from the PowerFlex Manager online help. You can view the latest requirements for each release by searching for support for full and partial network automation in the online help. This brings you to a table that lists the current requirements.

Supported Operating Systems:

• ESXi
• CentOS
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux

PowerFlex Roles:

• Hyperconverged
• Compute-Only
• Storage-Only (CentOS only)

Target Boot Devices:

• Local Flash Storage for Dell Technologies PowerFlex

Network Settings:

• The system must be using our latest LACP bonding NIC port design
  • See this related article to determine current network design: PowerFlex Manager - PowerFlex logical network release, interoperability, and expansion rules (Log in as registered Dell customer is required to view article)
• Switch ports configured with Port Channel (LACP Enabled) or Trunk        
• Node must have 25 GB NICs installed
• Switches can be 10 GB
  • There must be 10 GB SFPs on the NIC and Switch side for this to work
• No PXE/OS installation network requirement

When adding an existing service to PowerFlex Manager, you should only choose Partial Network Automation under the following circumstances:

• System is one of the following:
  • PowerFlex Appliance
  • PowerFlex Rack with an Impact Assessment on record
• The service was previously built using PNA in PowerFlex Manager
• The service is being added to PowerFlex Manager for the first time, meets all PNA requirements, and will be expanded in the future with PNA automation in PowerFlex Manager.

We recommend using Full Network automation since it has more features and benefits.