Dell MD3000i and R710 – Shiny and New

Well, the time finally came. We bit the bullet and purchased a new Dell PowerEdge R710 and an MD3000i SAN for the office. The R710 will be a new VSphere ESXi 4 host that will take on a bulk of the production VM’s while one of the remaining 2950′s will remain a smaller production host and the third 2950 will be a test and development box.

So you can see the MD3000i with the faceplate off directly below the new R710. I’m tempted to leave the faceplate off so that the executives and visitors see more lights when they look in. For some reason, non-technical people tend to have a first reaction to hardware such that more lights is mo’ better.

Along with these two pieces of hardware, we went ahead and got a Dell PowerConnect 5424 iSCSI optimized switch. This will be dedicated to the storage segment for the time being. Configuration of the switch meant actually going back to the rack. Initial configuration must be done via serial cable (included). Once you configure the management IP address and administrator credentials, the rest of the configuration can be done via the web based management tool.

Now the R710 was purchased with the nice iDRAC. This web based, out of band, management tool is wonderful. No client to load. You can configure, manage and review just about anything at the hardware level here.

One of the things I really liked about the new iDRAC is the console redirection or virtual KVM functionality. Of course, this allows you to run a java application the is the server console, however, it also allows you to map client resources as virtual media for the server.

In our case, we mapped the VMWare Vsphere ESXi 4 ISO image to the R710 server. We booted to it and installed the operating system without so much as a single walk back to the serer rack. This is much akin to the VMWare ability to mount client CD/DVD drives or ISO images as media for the guest operating systems. The difference here is that this is for the physical hardware. Lights out operations, indeed!

Finally, the MD3000i is configured with the Dell MD3000i Configuration Utility. Downloading this zip file was easy enough, extracted the contents and ran the SAConfig.bat file. The wizard walks you through the process. We had already wired the management ports on the MD3000i to our LAN while leaving the controllers on the storage network. The Wizard easily identified the unit, asked us for information on how we wanted to configure ip addresses and the like and then applied the configuration to the MD3000i. 5 minutes later we used the Modular Disk Storage Manager to begin the configuration process.

Dell will be helping with the final configuration next week but already setting up iSCSI to the ESXi hosts has been fairly painless following the documented processes outlined by Dell and VMWare.

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