Dell PowerProtect DD Management Center (DDMC) 7.9 Installation and Administration Guide

Network discovery

DDMC provides network discovery of managed PowerProtect DD systems. Network discovery is automatic, and network groups are built from the IP configuration of the managed DD systems. The DDMC collects and saves the network interface configuration and creates network groups based on the network topology. See Figure 1.

Pool access IP address

At a high level, when you create a system pool within a data center, you:

1. Add DD systems to the pool.
   NOTE To create a system pool in the "ready" state, the systems must belong to at least one common network group. The DDMC UI enables you to view systems that are in the same network groups.
2. Review the network groups and identify the ones to use for accessing the system pool.
3. Configure a pool access IP address for each identified network group. The pool access IP address is used for redirection.

See Figure 2.

Mobile storage unit access

When you create a mobile storage unit, you specify:

• A system pool, which determines the DD systems that can host the mobile storage unit
• The network group (or groups) that file system clients can use to access the mobile storage unit
• A Mobile Boost User with credentials for accessing the mobile storage unit

During mobile storage unit (MSU) access, a file system client connects to the pool access IP address for the network group. See Figure 3.

In the example shown, mobile storage unit MSU-1 is hosted on system DD3 and is configured for system pool SP-1. Two workloads access MSU-1. One workload uses Network Group 1, which accesses IP pool address IP10 (as shown in Figure 2). The other workload uses Network Group 2 and IP50 for pool access. MSU-1 is configured for access by both network groups. In the example, to access MSU-1, a mobile Boost user provides a username and password to connect to IP10, the pool access IP address for Network Group 1.