It is time to cable and install my
SimpliVity 325 node pair ready for action! With the newly released software version 4.1! Right after this! Hi! I'm Markus and this is where we
talk everything about enterprise IT - from bare metal to cloud native. If you are into that sort of stuff,
please consider subscribing. Thanks! Last time we unboxed these SimpliVity 325 nodes. If you haven't seen that one yet by
the way take a look at it right here. This time we are going to do the installation
including cabling and software deployment. I will also give you a few tips how to avoid some
of the mistakes I made during the installation. Oh! What's this...you must be wondering. This is a USB stick but not just any USB stick. It's a USB stick with the long awaited SimpliVity 4.1
which will be announced just about right now. That's right, I got an early access to
the software well before the release. Big kudos to HPE SimpliVity team for that. And so in the end of the video we are
going to talk about the main features - of the new software version 4.1. Also kudos to HPE for sponsoring this video. If you want to jump to a specific chapter you'll
find all the timestamps from the description below. Alright, let's take a look at everything
we need for a successful installation. From the hardware point of view the minimum
SimpliVity configuration, which I have here, - consists of four hardware components: two SimpliVity nodes (AMD based here),
one standard server and one switch. You'll also need a bunch of software that
you can download from HPE Software Center. You'll get quite a few files with the
download package but at this stage we are only interested in three of them: - SimpliVity Deployment Manager, Arbiter
and SimpliVity plugin for vSphere client. Additionally, you'll need to have a supported
VMware vCenter Server Appliance running - before you start the deployment. That's why we need the extra server here. Before we can do the cabling
one thing to remember: - Simplivity 325 Gen10 does not ship with the
1 gig Ethernet card that's needed for management - so you will need to remember
to order this card separately. Doesn't cost anything but just be sure
to include it in the configuration. Okay, let's cable these things! We have four types of cables here. First, 2 x 25 gig direct attach cables or
DACs for direct connecting the two nodes. And this is actually one of the main attractions
of SimpliVity for small environments: - If you only have two nodes like I do you
don't need an expensive 10 or 20 gig switch. You just direct connect two
cables and that's it. Super easy. Now, if you use larger than two node
clusters or any other brand HCI solution - you need to invest in a serious
switch like this monster. Don't get me wrong, it's super cool but it's quite
overkill and sets you back worth of a summer car. Next, connecting the 3 iLO cables to
whatever 1 gig switch you have lying around. No special requirements. Just FYI: SimpliVity iLOs are not set to DHCP like
ProLiants normally. Instead, they have a fixed IP. Then, the 3 VMware management cables for
all three servers to the same switch. I'm using only one cable per
server in my demo environment but - of course you should be using
at least two in production. And lastly, the power cables. Again, I'm using only one cable per server here. Do NOT try that in production! That's it! Cabling is done.
Can't be much more straightforward. Makes a 2-node SimpliVity 325 cluster ideal for
edge deployments with limited staff and space. Time to boot up the SimpliVity nodes. Software deployment starts
with vCenter installation which is already up and running for me here. Just a heads-up: vCenter appliance is the only supported vCenter version
with SimpliVity these days. No more Windows vCenters. Then, let's install the SimpliVity
Deployment Manager on any computer in the same network as vCenter. I'm using my daily driver Windows 10 PC right
over there so I'm gonna install it on there. Installation is a next-next-next Windows
app installation, nothing special here. Next, Arbiter. This one is a bit special and
it's required only with 2-node clusters - to act as a tie breaker in
split brain situations - where communication between
the two nodes have been lost - and both of those nodes think they
are the only storage nodes alive. Someone needs to make a decision which
one will be servicing production - and that someone is Arbiter. You don't need Arbiter with
clusters more than 2 nodes. It's recommended but not required. Arbiter can also be installed on whatever
Windows machine on the same network - so, I'm installing it on my PC again. Last, SimpliVity plug-in for vCenter. This one adds SimpliVity management
features to the vCenter user interface. Installing the plug-in is a bit more complicated. You'll need to SCP the installation package to the
vCenter server and then run a few Linux commands. By no means I'm a Linux guru but
following the deployment guide - got me through pretty much the
installation with no problems. Now, we are all set for the actual deployment! On the login page of the Deployment Manager - you'll actually see the first new 4.1 feature:
deployment pre-check. It's the same configuration validation
tool that's been there forever - but now you can access it directly and validate
your environment for smooth deployment - without the need to go through
all the deployment steps first. By no means this validation is 100% accurate,
it does not notice all imaginable problems - but it surely helps a lot. So, after login it's time to
enable InfoSight support because... Why not? Select the vCenter cluster, number
of nodes, Arbiter location... If you have saved a configuration file
earlier you can choose to use it here and to speed up the deployment - but we'll do everything from scratch
so manually entering the settings. Now we need to find the two SimpliVity nodes. You can check the node IP addresses
from the iLO remote console - where the nodes are waiting to
be discovered after the boot. Since SimpliVity 4.1 now supports vSphere 7, - let's choose that as a hypervisor
to be deployed on the nodes. I will choose the one available 1 gig connection
to be used as the ESX management connection - and I will choose only one of
the 25 gig connections to be - used for storage and federation traffic for now. You should choose both 25 gig connections but I
just wanted to test if it goes through with one. Bby the way, it does. Setting some passwords for the nodes... MTU for management network should be 1500. Setting management network gateways and
subnets according to my network settings... And since I'm using a flat network,
I will be using vLAN 0. For two nodes we'll need
4 free management IP addresses: - 2 for ESX hosts themselves and
2 for the virtual storage controllers. Let's use a 10 network here. Then, under the storage network settings - we want to use jumbo frames for storage
traffic so we'll set the MTU to 9000. Gateways are optional but subnet is mandatory. Now, THIS is where I wanted to cut corners - and used IP addresses from the same
network as with the management. Do NOT do that. Deployment WILL fail. Trust me. Just come up with a new
network or vLAN for storage. So I'm using a 20 network for storage here. The same goes for the federation network:
set MTU to 9000 and use a third network. Next up, domains. I don't have any existing domains in my
network and I'm anyway out of imagination so - I will just use the example
domains from the deployment guide - and since I don't have domains setup, let's uncheck the "Find and
register the host by domain name". Choose at least 3 NTP servers from the list
or type your own if you have some available. By the way, talking about NTP
servers be sure to synchronize time using NTP servers with your vcenter, too. Preferably use the same ones you
are using with the SimpliVity nodes. Summary of the settings...everything looks good... So, off we go to testing the host settings. Some steps will be skipped since
they don't apply to my setup - and there's one caution about
accelerator card missing. This is fine since SimpliVity 325 does not have a physical accelerator card but
uses software acceleration. So, just ignore that. In my opinion, doesn't sound like worthy of
a caution at all, if you're listening HPE. So, all good - moving forward. Since the configuration seems to be okay, let's
save the configuration file for the future - and then starting the deployment. This bit is 48 steps in total
and took some 25 minutes for me - and overall the whole process with
software installation is about an hour. IF you don't do anything foolish. Like I did. THEN, it's going to be two days. So, here's the story that leads to
my most important lesson learned: - Always, always, always...check the
installation package integrity! So, my nodes shipped with software version
4.0.1 and I needed to upgrade them to 4.1. I did that using the deploy installer image file. So, I upgraded the nodes but after the
first boot everything went haywire. I started to get all kinds of weirdness
like iLO virtual media not connecting and - close to half an hour node boot-up times. After trying to troubleshoot this for a day or
so I decided to contact SimpliVity support - and one of the first things they asked
me to do is validate the file integrity. With every file in the SimpliVity
software download package you'll get an sha256 file to
validate the file integrity. There are plenty of software for calculating
the hash. I used Win32 Disk Imager Turned out the installation package
was indeed totally corrupted. No idea what and when happened - but it did. Took a while to get the nodes up
and running again but I can say - that I would not have managed
without SimpliVity support. I have to say that I've been in contact with
quite a few support entities during my career - but SimpliVity support experience was by
far, hands down the best I've ever had. So, one more time: thank you,
SimpliVity team, for a superb support. That's it! SimpliVity 325 cluster up and running. So the big news. HPE is finally releasing the
new SimpliVity software version, version 4.1. It's been more than a year
since the last update so I'm - sure this will be a very welcome update for many. The first enhancement is Cloud Volumes backup. SimpliVity has the awesome
in-built backup capability - but now it's possible to back up SimpliVity data - also to the cloud. Perfect
for hybrid environments. Talking about backups, the second improvement
with this new software version is - StoreOnce backups over WAN networks. Especially useful for edge locations to do
backups to the centralized StoreOnce instance. Related to that SimpliVity can now optimize
the network performance for backups. It's doing this by throttling the production
bandwidth during the backup processes. Also with software version 4.1 SimpliVity
gets the support for CSI plugin - giving SimpliVity container ammunition. Lastly, as I already mentioned SimpliVity
now supports the latest vSphere version 7. Talking about updates, there's also a new disk
configuration available for SimpliVity 380 G: - a 24 SSD version with 32
terabytes of storage capacity. Should be plenty. Phew! That was a lot. Hopefully you enjoyed the video
and if you did give me a like - and see you with the next one!
