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Foundation Central

Foundation Central Overview

Foundation Central can create clusters from factory-imaged nodes and reimage existing nodes that are already registered with Foundation Central, remotely from Prism Central. This provides benefit such as creating cluster on remote sites such as ROBO, without arranging for a deployment personnel visit.

Limitations

Foundation Central has the following limitations:

  • Foundation Central supports creation of one node cluster without imaging on factory shipped nodes with AOS and any hypervisor installed.

  • Foundation Central supports creation of one node cluster with imaging only on nodes that are shipped out of factory with DiscoveryOS installed.Note: If you want to create a one or two-node cluster, ensure that the nodes you select support the creation of a one or two-node cluster.

  • Imaging logs of the remote node are not available on Prism Central. These logs are only accessible within the nodes.

  • It does not support updating the CVM memory and hostname for one node cluster creation without imaging.

Set up Foundation Central

This section describes the procedure to set up Foundation Central.

Before you begin

  • Ensure that the physical network configuration of the nodes is done.

  • Set up DHCP as it is mandatory to register the nodes with Foundation Central.

  • Ensure that you have the login credentials to the Prism Central VM where Foundation Central is used.

About this task

Perform the following procedures to set up Foundation Central.

Procedure

  1. Enable Foundation Central on Prism Central

  2. Configuring the DHCP Vendor-Specific Options for Nodes

Network Port Requirements

The following port diagram shows the ports that must be open for Foundation Central:

Figure. Network Port Requirements

Click to enlarge

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Enable Foundation Central on Prism Central

About this task

Perform the following steps to enable Foundation Central on a Prism Central VM.

Procedure

  1. Log on to the Prism Central VM where you want to deploy Foundation Central.

  2. Click the hamburger menu and select Services > Foundation Central.

  3. In the Foundation Central screen, click Enable Foundation Central > Enable.
    Note: You cannot disable Foundation Central after enabling it.

  4. To generate an API key, click + Generate Key in theSettings tab and provide an alias.
    It is used to configure the DHCP vendor-specific option later.Note: The Foundation Central log file is available at~/data/logs/foundation_central.out in the Prism Central VM.

Configuring the DHCP Vendor-Specific Options for Nodes

For the factory-imaged nodes to connect with Foundation Central on the Prism Central VM, they need two values:

  • Foundation Central IP addressNote: If you use Foundation Central in a scale-out PC, the Foundation Central IP address used in DHCP server must be the external IP address of the Prism Central cluster.

  • API keyNote: You can generate the API key on the Settings page in Foundation Central UI, which is assigned to the nodes through DHCP. This key authenticates API communication between the node and Foundation Central. If an API key has to be deleted, ensure that a new API key is added to the DHCP server.

Note:

  • Ensure that the DHCP server adheres to the DHCP standard described in RFC 2132 so that it supports vendor-specific information

  • For imaging nodes booted into DiscoveryOS, the static IPs provided must be from a pool that is different from the DHCP IP pool.

The factory-imaged nodes are configured to be in DHCP mode by default. You can configure DHCP servers to provide these two values to the nodes. To configure a Windows or Linux DHCP server, see the following sections:

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