The release of XtremIO V4 earlier this year delivered a lot of improvements to an already powerful package.
One of the improvements I have been keen to explore was the ability to manage multiple clusters from a single XMS console.
The benefits I see are obvious… A single management point for multiple clusters, consolidated reporting, and reduced Management footprint (each XMS vm requires 2 x vCPU, 8GB RAM and in my case > 200GB of Storage space.
There wasn’t a lot of info regarding the process, and I couldn’t find anything in the GUI to accomplish this, but tucked away in the User Guide was the “Add-Cluster” command.
The syntax looked simple..
add-cluster sc-mgr-host=hostname and an optional force switch
So let’s check out the before;
and now let’s run the add-cluster command;
(be sure to use “” around th sc-mgr-host input, whether you use it’s ip address or fqdn, otherwise it will fail)
..and voila. Done. It literally took just a few seconds. And I can then shutdown and delete the XMS vm that was formerly managing the cluster.
Too easy, and I’m a happy camper. It’s simple, seamless and non-disruptive.
For other details on V4 improvements, check out the great blog by Itzik Reich