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Requirements for HCI Scale to work in NDE

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Applies to

  • HCI Storage Element OS 
  • HCI Deployment Engine/Monitoring Agent
  • NDE 1.4 or later

Answer

When trying to add a new compute node to an existing NetApp HCI installation using the NetApp Deployment Engine and the system reports the error message "Your network could not be detected. Ensure that this is the datacenter and cluster associated with your vCenter instance.", use the information below to narrow down what the unsupported configuration is.

The existing compute cluster must meet the following requirements:

  • Must have a minimum of 4 vmk interfaces
    • One management vmk interface
    • One vmotion vmk interface
    • Two vmks on the same subnet with iSCSI bindings to the software iSCSI initiator
  • The vmk interface to vmnic assignment should comply with one of the following configurations:
1087627-1.png
Acronyms: VSS - Virtual Standard Switch or Standard Switch; VDS - Virtual Distributed Switch or Distributed Switch

The following changes are supported by post-NDE deployment, as long as the above requirements are still satisfied.

  • Changing virtual switch names
  • Changing port group names
  • Adding or removing port groups
  • Migrating from VSS to VDS and vice versa (see table above)

NetApp Deployment Engine does not support network configuration that is split between VSS and VDS.

For more details on how to convert existing deployments of NetApp HCI compute nodes that use six interfaces to only use two interfaces, see https://www.netapp.com/us/media/tr-4738.pdf.

Additional Information

The “minimum of 4 vmk interfaces” means that you can have more than 4 vmk interfaces. However, only one can be the management vmk, one can be the vmotion vmk, and two for the storage connection. The customer can add other vmk interfaces as long as they are not also used for management, vmotion, or storage. This is because we currently use those management and vmotion markers to know which interface is for management. So for example, a customer can add additional vmk interfaces for replication, but it shouldn’t have a vmotion or management flag.

 

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