VNXe3200 and Unisphere Central

Unisphere Central is an EMC product which enables centralized management of multiple VNXe, VNX, CLARiiON CX4 and XtremSW Cache Cards through a single console. The Unisphere Central allows administrators to get alerts, capacity and performance metrics, group systems, and launch Unisphere on remote VNXe or VNX systems and XtremSW Management Center GUI for the XtremSW Cache Cards from a central management interface.

This can be pretty handy if you are managing multiple EMC arrays.

EMC Unisphere Central is deployed from an OVA which can be downloaded from EMC’s support site (an EMC Account login is required). During the OVA deployment you are asked to provided the management IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway.

Once the OVA has been deployed simply point a browser to the management address and log in with the default username and password (admin/Password123#). You will be asked to change the admin password on first login. Once the admin password has been changed you can then configure hostname, DNS, NTP, AD LDAP authentication, etc. The configuration of Unisphere Central is, for the most part, the same as when initially configuring an EMC array.

To allow for the collection of performance information from connected arrays Metric Collection must be enabled and storage allocated. This is done from Settings -> Management Settings -> Metrics. When storage is allocated a vmdk is provisioned on a selected datastore and attached to the Unisphere Central appliance. Metric storage utilization can monitored and expanded if needed.

To configure an array for Unisphere Central you will need the Server Hash and Challenge Passphrase. This is obtained from Settings -> Management Settings -> General on the Unisphere Central appliance:

On the array, the VNXe 3200 in this case, enable Unisphere Central Configuration and enter the Server Hash and Challenge Passphrase.

Once the VNXe has been configured for Unisphere Central the array will appear on the Unisphere Central dashboard. Logs, alerts, capacity, provisioned storage, connected hosts, and performance details will be available for the array.