Dell EMC PowerFlex Rack Using PowerFlex Manager

Element manager discovery

The IPI cabinet is discovered as an element manager. Once PowerFlex Manager discovers the IPI cabinet, you can view cabinet details or open the IPI appliance management application to view more details.

CloudLink Center is discovered as an element manager. If you create your own username in CloudLink Center, you need the SecAdmin access role and the local user type for the new user to complete discovery. The client user type does not work for discovery in PowerFlex Manager. If one member of a cluster of CloudLink Centers is shut down, the inventory still succeeds because PowerFlex Manager inventories the other CloudLink Center cluster members.

Node discovery

PowerFlex Manager supports PowerFlex node discovery and allows you to onboard nodes by configuring the initial management IP address and iDRAC credentials. To perform initial discovery and configuration, verify that the management IP address is set on the node and that PowerFlex Manager can access the IP address through the network. While configuring IP addresses on the node, verify that PowerFlex Manager can access any final IP address in a range used for hardware management, to complete discovery of these nodes.

PowerFlex Manager allow you to use name-based searches to discover a range of nodes that were assigned IP addresses by DHCP to iDRAC. You can search for a range of DNS hostnames or a single hostname within the Discovery wizard. After you perform a name-based discovery, PowerFlex Manager operations to iDRAC continue to use name-based IP address resolution.

Switch discovery

If you attempt to discover a Cisco switch with terminal color configured, the discovery fails. To discover the switch successfully, disable the terminal color option by running configure no terminal color persist.

Virtual machine manager discovery

PowerFlex Manager users with the administrator role can discover a VMware vCenter as a VM manager in PowerFlex Manager. A vCenter read-only user can discover a vCenter in PowerFlex Manager only after the following requirements are met:

• The vCenter user who is specified in the vCenter credential is granted the VirtualMachine.Provisioning.ReadCustSpecs and StorageProfie.View privileges.
• The permission containing these privileges is granted to that user on the root vCenter object and the Propogate to children property is set to True.

PowerFlex Manager allows you to deploy new hyperconverged and compute-only services and add existing services to a vCenter that has an enhanced link mode (ELM) configuration. ELM connects multiple vCenter servers, allowing you to search across servers and perform other vCenter management functions. ELM does not provide clustering or redundancy.

If you are working with a vCenter that has an enhanced link mode configuration, you must discover only the vCenter to which you want to deploy or add an existing service. You do not need to discover the other vCenters that are connected though the enhanced link mode configuration.

Presentation server discovery

If you deploy a service with a presentation server, PowerFlex Manager automatically discovers the presentation server.