by Joel Piper, Citrix
If you’ve not had an opportunity to see my first two articles in the series “Hands-On with Hyperflex,” I encourage you to take some time to review them. Part 1 discusses what you’ll need to prepare for HyperFlex while Part 2 walks you through installation process. In this final article we’ll take a look at what post-install tasks you’ll need to complete in order to be ready to host production workloads; namely, enabling HR/DRS per best practices, setting up vMotion, VM portgroups and configuring NTP settings, among other things.
Again, the whole point of HyperFlex (and HCI, in general) is to make it easier to manage, enable quicker deployments and facilitate more agile environments. All of the tasks above could be done manually, if desired, but that can be time consuming and potentially error-prone. Instead, you can use the Post-Install Script already available on your HX Data Platform Installer. Let’s take a look.
SSH to the HX Data Platform Installer and login with username/password of “root” and “Cisco123” then enter the command “post_install”:
Next step is to enter the vCenter username and password. The script will then discover your datacenter and cluster (SilvertonHCL_2 and HyperFlex_2, in this case) and prompt you for the various parameters noted below with the corresponding response or data input:
- Enable HR/DRS – yes
- Disable SSH warning – yes
- Add vMotion interface – yes. Refer back to your Pre-Install Checklist to verify the vMotion IPs for your hosts and enter them accordingly.
- Add VM network VLANS – no
- Enable NTP on ESX hosts – yes
- Enable Lenient Mode – yes
When complete, your SSH session will look similar to this:
You can enter “no” when prompted to send a test email. At this point, the script will perform various checks to ensure proper network connectivity and the health of the HX Cluster:
An example of the Post-Install Script with no errors encountered:
The last step is to create the new datastore, which is accomplished via the vSphere Web Client. For whatever reason using Internet Explorer to navigate to the HyperFlex Systems Plug-in in vSphere proved inconsistent and troublesome. This is similar to the issue I ran into when using IE to login to the HX Data Platform Installer during the installation process outlined in my second article. And just like before, I would recommend using Chrome if you’d like the HX Plug-in to be displayed properly.
Login to the vSphere Web Client and go to Hosts and Clusters, then select your new HX Cluster. Load the HX Plug-in by scrolling down and selecting it from the “Cisco HyperFlex Systems” section. At this point you may run into a known issue with the HX Plug-in. Instead of populating the section with your HX Cluster it may sit at a “Loading cluster details…” message:
If this happens, navigate to vCenter Inventory Lists and it will show the HX Cluster details:
Now go back to Cluster Node and the HX Plug-in will display properly. (Also know this issue will be addressed in an upcoming release.) Click on the Manage tab and inside Datastores select the “Create Datastore” icon, then provide a datastore name and amount of storage to provision.
Once the datastore is created (or datastores, in this case) it will look similar to this:
That’s it, you’re done! Other than the IE/Chrome issue, completing the post-install tasks and creating your datastore(s) is very straightforward. Again, if you took the time to complete the Pre-Install Checklist executing the Post-Install Script just takes a matter of minutes – how quickly can you answer “y” or “n” to a couple of prompts and enter a few IP addresses? At this point your environment is configured and you can begin the process of provisioning your XenDesktop and XenApp workloads.
I’m looking forward to digging into HyperFlex performance in future posts. Until then, keep calm and return fire.
Joel
