Storage Area Network Configuration

hello and welcome this is Craig with integrity systems and today we're going to start a multi-part video of how to set up a Dell equal object PS Series storage array and as you can see we got our first shipment here from Dell we're looking at the beginning of our switching fabric for our San Network in particular we're looking at two n series switches these are n 2024 switches so let's open them up and see what we got inside so there's the switch wrapped in plastic cup so start off here in the front we have the Dell logo we have our model designation like I said before the N 2024 switch it has 24 gigabit ports which is what we're looking at right there we have a management port which is a serial interface we have two SFP+ ports 10 gig Ethernet ports we have a LED which is the stack number indication in particular with this config we're going to have two switches in a stack one of them will be the master which will be designated as the number one and the slave will be designated as number two we have some diagnostic LEDs in the corner here and we have a USB port which is useful for firmware uploads config uploads config downloads that type stuff on the side here we have holes for our rack mounting ears which we're going to utilize in this particular case these two switches are going to end up in a to post rack on the other side corresponding holes at the bottom of the switch all the regulatory information that needs to be on these things fairly unimportant for our purposes on the back of the switch we have two stacking ports which we are going to utilize in this particular configuration along with their status lights their link and activity lights for each particular port you have the pullout for your service tag your Express service code your primary switch MAC address to non-removable system fans a plate which is covering the slot for the redundant power supply unit that you could purchase for these particular switches we have a little bar here in order for you to velcro your power cable to the switch so that way it doesn't fall out of the power which is right next to it cover it up by this little sticker these take your typical you know computer power cord not like the power over ethernet models of these which require a special notched power cord and the top of the switch has the Dell logo on a brocade sticker let's look at what else is in the box we have a serial 9 pin serial port with an rj45 and for configuration and a velcro strap rubber feet ears and corresponding screws for the ears as well as some cage nuts and screws for the cage nuts on if you're going to put this in a you know square hole rack square hole enclosure as well as some screws for you know your round hole racks and enclosures and basically that's what's in that box second box here packing material we have two power cords or two switches extra-long which are nice we have redundant copies of our safety environmental and regulatory information and we have our stacking tables 1 meter stacking cables you can get these at you know various lengths but in particular for this configuration we're using 1 meter stacking cables got two of those and at the bottom of the box we have our second end 2024 switch which I'm not going to bore you guys with the unboxing of that since it's already something we just looked at so let's get into the configuration of this and I'll show you guys how to configure it to work efficiently according to the best practices guide that Dell has published let's get started okay so here we are our switches are connected to the power they're stacking cables are connected to the back of the switches we have a serial port connected to switch one of the stack and we have port 24 on the second switch connected via cat5 cable to the station that we're going to use to configure this particular setup so let's take a look at the guide that we're following here it can be found on Dells Tech Center and as you can see there's a number of switches here from various manufacturers you got Cisco brocade HP the document that we're going to be working with in particular is this guy right down here this Dell networking end 2000 series document which I have in this tab up top for a general overview of how everything is going to be connected here we can look at this diagram there's some differences with this diagram in the system that we're going to be putting together for instance they reference in our 710 server in this configuration we are going to be using three our 730 servers just a slightly newer model the other thing that they mention is that they are going to use this lag group who connected via the sfp+ ports we are not going to have it set up that way we are going to use the stacking cable the other thing is that they mentioned they're going to use a PS series a 6100 we are using a 4100 but all intents and purposes this is a great diagram of how everything will be connected and plugged in the other thing to mention is that we are not going to be using chapter 2 of this guide chapter 2 of this guide references the fact that you're going to be using the FSF SP + ports on the front of the switches instead we are going to be using chapter 3 of this guide which is the stacked configuration and here we have the tab our tab in chrome for the product support page which as you can see here has the firmware for the Dell and 2000 series switches I can almost guarantee that the firmware that's on these switches right now is not the newest version typically these things sit in warehouses and by the time you get them delivered to your office they're going to have an outdated firmware so this is definitely something that we're going to want to put you know on these units so let's get started first thing we're going to do is we're going to connect via putty to these switches putty is a free tool you know just Google for putty and you'll find that you know the download link grab that we're going to connect via serial and so let's look to see what comport Windows has assigned our USB to serial port adapter it looks like it's comm 3 so we're going to go ahead and we're going to change that from com1 to comm 3 the default settings that putty has in there should be perfectly fine for this particular configuration so you know let's go ahead and hit open and get connected to the switches all right there's the CLI ok so now we're going to jump into configure mode and type that in on the window here oh actually we got to get into enable mode first so enable mode now we're going to go into configure mode and what we're going to do here is we are going to configure VLAN 1 we're going to configure VLAN 1 for an IP on the sand subnet but first let's look at the switch configuration that we have to work with quite a bit of stuff here you can see that the switch if it had a DHCP server on the network it would have got an IP we're going to extend that to be a static IP address but you can also see that it shows some of the information regarding the stack members in there and that was all handled by the switches as those stacking cables or were connected to the back of them so this is the command to add an IP address to VLAN number one it's going to be 10.0 20.7 which is just an IP that's available on our sand subnet and we're going to use a slash 23 subnet mask and that's a Sun so the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and assign an an IP gateway a default gateway for the unit so in this particular case the default gateway is going to be ten 0.21 which is the IP address of our core router and after this we're going to go ahead and we're going to set up a username and a password for HTTP access and we're also going to go ahead and set up an enable password for serial access SSH access and the like let's go ahead and and do that the command here to set up the HTTP server authentication you know is fairly long-winded we're telling the HTTP server that we're going to use the local database with that particular command and then here we're going to go ahead and set up a user named administrator with a super-secret password of password you know these type of things don't end up getting pushed into production it just makes it a whole lot easier to work with it with a simple password while we're testing things out we're setting it to privilege level 15 which is the highest security level and then we're going to go ahead and put an enable password in place also password just to keep things simple you know we're going to be going in and out of the configuration quite a bit so like I said to type in something fairly complicated it just gets a little bit cumbersome so once we're ready to put this into production we'll go ahead and switch that out and you know we'll go ahead and make it as something a little bit more complex but right now let's go ahead and see what IP address we have on our local area connection as we want to try to ping this switch make sure that you know we're able to to see it and let's see here like I thought it's set for DHCP so let's set something on the local subnet and that IP should work we'll have the same subnet mask will throw the default gateway in place no need for DNS servers we don't have any of those on our sand subnet so we'll go ahead and save all of this out here and we're going to open up a window we're going to ping the IP and voila we're able to ping it perfect okay so let's verify that we can get into the web interface for the switch punch that IP in there we go and let's go ahead and put in the username of administrator and the password of password which is that account that we created via the CLI make sure we're able to log in perfect go ahead and tell Chrome we don't want to save that password and the next thing that we're going to do is just sort of continue along that guide and we're going to jump into the CLI and we're going to enable the I scuzzy optimization feature the command to enable that ice because the optimization feature is fairly straightforward it's just I scuzzy space and able and what that's going to do is that's going to turn jumbo frames on for all of our ports that's going to disable unicast storm it's going to enable port fast on all the ports spanning-tree portfast and then it's also going to configure flow control on all the ports just in one simple you know command which is great and that's why we like to use these um these n series switches so let's go ahead and punch that in here on the CLI after we do that it's going to ask us to confirm that we do indeed want to enable this okay so even though it tells you that the I scuzzy enable command is going to do all of this stuff magically for you the documentation still says that these things should be manually configured let me spell receive properly here the manual or the best practices guide I should say tells you to go and manually set the flow control receive to on and then it's going to ask for verification there turn that on and then it also says that we should go and make sure that jumbo frames are sort of manually set you know as well even though the I scuzzy enable command was supposed to do that but first let's look at the let's look at the config and see if that I scuzzy enable come in actually did anything to the config it doesn't really look like it you know we see our IP in there we see our username or password we see you know that the enable passwords been set so not a whole lot has changed config wise let's go ahead and change the or I should say manually set the jumbo frame setting to what it's supposed to be and then from there we also are told within this best practices guide to set on every single one of the port's the spanning-tree portfast mode which is going to help those interfaces come up just that much faster and really the only reason why they recommend you do this is because you're not supposed to have other switches connected to these ports these ports are going to mainly be used for your storage you're going to have your servers connected to it so there really isn't any or there shouldn't be any issues with a loop being created and so enabling port fast should be safe in this particular environment so let's go ahead and set the range ports to be all of our gigabit ports here we are not going to do the sfp+ ports in this particular setup we're not going to use the FSP ports sfp+ ports at all but let's do it on the gig ports we're going to set port fast to be enabled here and then we're going to go ahead and jump in save this config before we get too far into things and make mistake and do a reload and and you know lose everything that we've been working on here so save I don't think that works in this particular switch we got to do a copy our running config to our startup config and see there we go okay and we're going to go ahead and save that out so that way if we do reboot the switch we're in good shape okay oh yeah we got to be out of the configure mode in order to run that command so let's exit out let's go ahead and exit out of there and then we'll do that same command here to make sure our config changes are saved and yes we'll go ahead and save those perfect okay so the next thing we're going to do here is we're going to jump into the web interface we're going to see what version of the firmware we're using so let's drill down sort of in the menu structure here like I said I could almost guarantee that we're not using the latest firmware version it's very typical and active images yep and sure enough we're using 6.1 1.7 and the latest firmware is 6.2 1.6 so let's go ahead and you know upgrade this firmware we're going to go ahead and look at the download here extract the firmware itself it's not that big or it goes well there it goes slowly but surely surprising it's taking this long with an SSD but just give it a second there it goes jump in there and you know it's not done extracting yet here okay yeah close that window okay so there's the the firmware update it's about 22 Meg so not super large or anything like that and we're going to go ahead and jump into the the file download we're not going to use the USB flash drive to do this go to file download we're going to tell it we're going to do firmware we're going to transfer it via HTTP I don't want to get into the process of setting up a TFTP server and all of that stuff go ahead and select the firmware to download to the switch and we're going to let this sort of do its thing I'm going to edit the video so we don't have to sit through this long update process and what I'll show you sort of the start of it hit OK on that window there it says it's going to take several minutes we know that it doesn't take 18 minutes but it does take a bit of time you know maybe maybe three or four minutes so I'll pick the video back up when we're ready all right so we're done we're back it says that that transfer was complete so let's click OK and we'll go look at the active images tab here or active images page and as you can see the active image version has been updated but the active the current active image is still the 6.1 1.7 also you can see that it updated unit 1 and it updated unit 2 which actually is one of the reasons why you would you would put the switches into a stacked configuration because as you know you've seen you got a single IP that's single pane of glass and you're able to manage all of the switches in the stack through that single web interface so we need to reload the switch here to go ahead and use this current active image or to upgrade the current active image version to the 6.2 dot 1.6 so let's go and reset it yeah and here we go and this takes I don't know maybe two minutes we're going to do the whole stack go ahead and apply that and hit OK there's nobody connected to it obviously so we are good to go we already saved our config you know and we're going to go take a look at this thing restart and putty will go through the whole process you'll get to see it from the beginning and then there's a command that if you read the the firmware install guide there's actually a command to update the boot code we'll jump in there we'll take a look and put it on the side here so we can still see everything booting up it's in this upgrading Dell networking file here let's let's just cancel this let's do a search for for this so it's easier to find we're going to look for update boot code which is the command and we're not going to find that spell that right here update boot okay update boot code and it should take us right to the section of the document that sort of describes what needs to be done so it says you know hey after your switch is you know finished rebooting which it looks like it's just finishing up doing that then you want to do a show version make sure that everything upgraded the way that it was supposed to and then you should run the update boot code command in order to update the boot code and then reload the switch one more time so there the switches just came back up looks like it's waiting for unit number two to finish loading see here give it a second there we go so we're going to go ahead and go into enable mode that's the enable password that we set and now we're going to go ahead and jump into that update boot code command super simple well first let's do that show version yeah so as we can see you know the active image and the currently active image have been upgraded to that 62.1 dot six which is exactly what we were we were hoping for and now we'll go ahead and update the boot code and go yes we do want to update it takes just a couple of seconds to run through that command okay and let's go ahead and do a reload no reason to do anything with thumb you know saving the running-config to the startup-config we didn't make any changes we'll go ahead and re load the whole stack all right so now why this is booting up what we're going to do next is we're going to jump in to the we're going to jump into the web interface and we're going to just configure some real general you know general settings on the switch they're not detailed in the best practices guide this is just something that we like to do you know on on the switches like you know specify who's responsible for the switch where the switch is located the name of the switch so that way when you're you know remotely managing these things here a little bit more of you know more aware of what it is that you're working on especially if you got a bunch of these in your environment it just it just helps you know to have that stuff in place we're also going to set some of the time zone settings s SN SN TP so that way we do get you know up up to date time and date information on these switches because when you're troubleshooting an issue and you're referencing logs on the sand and you're referencing logs on the switch and you're referencing logs on the server you sort of want all of those things to be synchronized just to make it a whole lot easier to pinpoint what the problem you know the problem would be so let's see these switches are getting close okay looks like we're just waiting on one of the other switches to come up there we go so now we got everything up we'll go ahead and re log on to the web interface here punch in our password and we're just going to tell chrome to not say that password we're going to jump into the general system information settings and I've done a to these so it's probably already saved in my history what I'm going to type in here so yeah that looks good technology department for the system context is something fairly general in this particular case and location server room yeah that's perfect go ahead and apply those settings and then we're going to jump into there's the global config there's our jumbo frame option that we set via the enable I scuzzy command there's time synchronization so we're going to go in and the first thing that we got to do is we got to add in an SMTP server but we're going to enable the client you know that's the I guess the first little page there and then we'll jump in down here by the servers and go ahead and we like to use DNS because we typically use us pool ntp org you can already see it there in our drop-down list select that go ahead and hit apply and now we're going to go into the summertime configuration and we're going to set it not there there we go and we're going to set it so when daylight savings time hits here in the United States that you know everything works the way that it's supposed to and that starts the the second week of March it's on a Sunday yep and it's at 2:00 a.m. so 2:00 a.m. and then it ends let's see week 1 a Sunday and in November and that also I guess ends at 2:00 a.m. so we're going to set that and the offset is 60 minutes put all of that in place we'll hit apply ok so now look at that location is set to us a would have been nice to just be able to set it to us a to start off with but I've been down that road and when you set it to USA it Gray's out everything else and it doesn't it let you apply the settings you just keep getting an error so let's go over and let's go under IP addressing domain name servers we don't have any on our sand subnet so we don't need to worry about those in this particular case but we will put in a default domain name go hit apply and then from here there we go we'll jump into our next setting that we're going to set up which is the HTTP server so in order to do that we got to generate a certificate even before you can enable it right you got to generate the certificate but before you can do that you gotta put in your common name your country those type of things so bear with me why I punch in the information here put in the common name go we're in the US so us the duration we're going to do you know ten years probably by the time we're ready to generate a new certificate we'll be looking at new switches hopefully I'm not sure if we need email we'll just go to location put in just some general information go and 248 bit we go generate certificate yeah yeah we do need email so we're just going to put our support address in there this is just something that's used internally anyway so there we go generate certificate they generate relatively quick so let's just go here to um and I think it's show all will go in to show all yep there's the certificate certificate one go back to detail we'll go ahead now and enable HTTPS using certificate number one go ahead and apply that voila okay let's see if it works try to connect using HTTPS yeah there we are just what I would expect go ahead proceed should take us to our login page put in our admin user and our password there we are HTTP is working as expected we're going to go ahead let's see we got a enable SSH we also want to think disabled telnet and we want to disable we want to disable HTTP so let's go in let's poke around for that here should be under yeah management security telnet server so that's the first thing we'll do we'll go ahead and set that to block and hit apply that will disable telnet and then we'll do this in the in the CLI I'll show you the command to disable the HTTP server but first SSH let's go ahead and enable SSH we've already generated the certificate because we're using it for HTTPS you know the DSA should be fine let's go ahead and hit apply on that perfect so SSH should be enabled now let's jump in the CLI and I'll show you let's verify let's verify SSH is actually working since we just enabled it yep go ahead and hit yes on that go login password sure enough SSH is working as expected so we'll go ahead and we're going to disable HTTP make this thing just that much more secure close that out jump back in we'll jump back into putty here there there we go okay and we're going to jump in to enable mode throwing our naval password spilitt right there you go and configure mode and the command to disable the HTTP servers fairly simple no IP HTTP server go ahead and we'll run that and well before we get too far along we we better save our config so we'll copy our running to our startup there we go okay so now we're going to jump back in we're going to verify that HTTP is indeed turned off go and we shouldn't get anything perfect so jump back HTTP I'll show you real quick in the GUI where you can do that the I scuzzy enable command if you didn't want to do it through the CLI it's just a single drop down box within the web config and so we'll just jump in there really fast and then there's probably a couple of other little nitpicky things that we want to set maybe SNMP and we need to set the spanning tree priority for this switch so do that here jump in to the I scuzzy settings under global configuration right there is the I scuzzy enable command that we ran from the CLI you just set that to from disabled to enabled it'll give you a little warning that it's going to make some fairly global configuration changes you go ahead and you say yes to it and you know it ends up enabling the flow control enabling the port fast setting the jumbo frames all of those things that you know we already talked about so let's go let's do two last things we will do the the SNMP configuration we like to monitor these things whenever possible so that is just under C and where exactly is that I think it's under there switching no there it is SNMP global parameters and now we need communities there we go and we're going to go ahead and add a new community string is something relatively generic we're going to tell it that all management stations can access this switch put in just a generic communities to we'll hit apply on that go back to the details tab make sure that our setting took effect perfect perfect okay now we're going to go down to switching and we're going to look at our spanning tree setup under global settings you know right now we're just using the default settings this particular switch is the root but we're going to switch the priority to be zero make it the lowest lowest level switch so that way it's always the root we'll go ahead and apply these changes there we go and we'll refresh the page because it looks like you know the priority is still set pretty high and there we go so set to zero just what we're looking for so there was one thing that we forgot to do when we were configuring the summertime configuration and that is the actual timezone configuration since we're in Nevada we have an offset of minus 8 and that would put us on PST time so we're going to go ahead and put that in save that change and last but not least we're going to go ahead and copy the running config to startup config so that way all of the settings that we've got in place at this point persist after a reboot of the switch there we go all set all right so that's the end of part one make sure you check out the other parts of the series as they get posted as you can see here's my contact information if any of you would like to reach out to me via email or to any one of my team members at integrity systems feel free I'm going to also go ahead and leave the comments section open down below so if I see any questions post it down below I'll try to get to them as soon as I can appreciate your time thank you very much

Channel: Integrita Systems

Views: 62,274

Rating: 4.7518249 out of 5

Keywords: Dell (Computer Manufacturer/Brand), Storage Area Network, Computer Network (Industry)

Id: LRc4XGbzddo

Length: 39min 33sec (2373 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2015