How to update VPLEX Management Server DNS settings

Hi Robert,

First off thank you for taking the time detail your effort to make changes to the VPLEX management server DNS settings and the concerns you raised regarding allowing changes to the VPLEX root password.

As you found, customer changes to DNS on the VPLEX management server are not officially supported for customers and, therefore, not documented. As you may know, VPLEX management server DNS settings are  configured by the EMC delivery team during VPLEX installation.  After that, the current methodology only allows for changes to be made by EMC service personnel.  To your point, however, this is too restrictive for many customer environments and would benefit from a re-evaluation to allow customer (Service account) adjustments.  I can also think of other typical Linux admin tasks (i.e. syslog redirection, making changes to ntp settings) that are not discussed in detail within the documentation.  In these cases, my advice is to open a ticket (or chat session) with EMC Customer support so that we are made aware and can internally track and resolve potential gaps *and* you can (hopefully) get a much quicker time to resolution.

Your root password comments are valid. Without going into too much detail, there were a few commands used by part replacement scripts that assumed a static root password when the commands are not defined for use with sudo.  If the root pw was changed, the scripts would fail.  We too recognize the need to change how the root account is used and have taken the necessary steps to allow it to be more easily changed by both our service staff and our customers.  In fairness, the work was not trivial and touched many parts of our automated testing, scripting, services, and development process so it has taken some time to get to where we are today.

Finally, if you have additional feedback on these topics, please feel free to reach out to me directly.  Once again, thank you for being an EMC customer and taking the time to share your product experiences (both positive and negative).

Regards,

-Don

VPLEX Corporate System Engineering