In this post we will take the Nutanix compute only cluster we built in the previous post and connect it to external storage to finish the cluster setup.
At the time of this posting Nutanix supports Dell PowerFlex and Pure Storage as external storage, with Dell PowerStore currently in early access with a release coming shorty. In my lab I will be connecting to an already deployed Dell PowerFlex. At the end this post the lab will look like this:
Collect Information from External Storage
Before we jump into Prism we need to collect a few pieces of information from the external PowerFlex storage for the connection wizard.
The main things we need are the hostname of the PowerFlex Manager, the name of the Protection Domain, and name of the Storage Pool that we will be using:
For me that will be “flex01.lab.local”, “pd01”, and “pool01”:
Connect the Cluster to External Storage
Log into Prism Element and click on the Setup External Storage hyperlink:
Choose Attach External Storage
Since I have a PowerFlex system I will be selecting Dell PowerFlex. Give the wizard the PowerFlex Storage Data Client (SDC) binaries that you will downloaded from Nutanix with your support account. Click install to have the wizard configure the SDC inside each CVM:
Once the SDCs are installed click Next:
Next provide the wizard the PowerFlex Manager hostname and credentials you want the Nutanix cluster to use to communicate with PowerFlex system. Since this is a lab I am just using the default admin account:
Lastly select the Protection Domain and Storage Pool you identified in the previous step and click Attach:
Wait for the Attach task to complete:
Once complete you will see the connection as Healthy:
And you will see a default Storage Container created and ready for VMs/ISOs called flex01, and the metrics you see come directly from the backend PowerFlex:
You can create additional storage containers if you need for logical separation, Nutanix Projects, advertised capacities smaller then the total pool, etc:
Since the storage is external you will see when creating/viewing Storage Containers that the Replication Factor, Data Reduction, Data Encryption, and Reserve Capacity are all handled by the backend storage engine so there is nothing to set in Prism. Additionally if you navigate to Settings -> Data Resiliency -> Cluster Fault Tolerance you will see that unlike a HCI cluster there is nothing to set/manage around 1D1N/2D2D since the Nutanix cluster is only compute and memory:
This concludes external storage setup. In the next post we will deploy Prism Central onto the cluster since with External Storage some tasks are meant to be done there:
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