PS6500E installation and configuration
One of the nice things about setting up a Dell Equallogic SAN is how amazingly simple it is to configure. You would think that for an expensive piece of equipment that it would be harder to configure and get going, but fortunately that is not the case.
After unpacking all 48 hard drives and inserting them into the chassis which definitely took quite a bit of time, plugging in three power cables and inserting an ethernet cable - it took right off. I was pretty impressed with the fact that none of the drives that shipped with the unit was bad - you would usually expect at least one to be bad out of 48 but not in this case. I inserted the Dell Configuration assistant CD into one of my servers and was able to run the remote configuration assistant where I got to set up the networking information and set the initial passwords and group membership. Since this was my first SAN, I set it up in its own group and assigned it a static IP address. I created a single storage pool of RAID5 in order to begin my testing and then the unit was up and functional.
I was able to log in to the web interface to the unit and do some more configuration and take a look at all of the settings. One thing I noticed was that the firmware was out of date on the unit but you cannot download directly from the SAN - you must first set up an Equallogic support account and then download the firmware separately. This was a bit of a pain and hopefully something that can be a bit more automated in the future.
Right now I have two volumes configured with IP address access going to a VMWare ESX server and a Windows 2003 Server for testing purposes. The Microsoft iSCSI initiator installation is very straight forward and setting up my targets were very simple.
I enabled SNMP monitoring through Solarwinds Orion and so far everything looks good.
After unpacking all 48 hard drives and inserting them into the chassis which definitely took quite a bit of time, plugging in three power cables and inserting an ethernet cable - it took right off. I was pretty impressed with the fact that none of the drives that shipped with the unit was bad - you would usually expect at least one to be bad out of 48 but not in this case. I inserted the Dell Configuration assistant CD into one of my servers and was able to run the remote configuration assistant where I got to set up the networking information and set the initial passwords and group membership. Since this was my first SAN, I set it up in its own group and assigned it a static IP address. I created a single storage pool of RAID5 in order to begin my testing and then the unit was up and functional.
I was able to log in to the web interface to the unit and do some more configuration and take a look at all of the settings. One thing I noticed was that the firmware was out of date on the unit but you cannot download directly from the SAN - you must first set up an Equallogic support account and then download the firmware separately. This was a bit of a pain and hopefully something that can be a bit more automated in the future.
Right now I have two volumes configured with IP address access going to a VMWare ESX server and a Windows 2003 Server for testing purposes. The Microsoft iSCSI initiator installation is very straight forward and setting up my targets were very simple.
I enabled SNMP monitoring through Solarwinds Orion and so far everything looks good.
posted by Rick Mitchell Solutions @ 2:55 PM
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