Today I figured I would play around with EMC CloudArray a bit on top of VSAN. It comes with a VxRail appliance by default so I figured I would check what it has to offer. For those who don’t know. CloudArray allows you to provide NFS/CIFS and Object based storage to your datacenter leveraging local storage but also integrate it with cloud storage for archival purposes. A pretty cool solution if you ask me, and could be a great way to deliver file and object services in an easy fashion on top of VSAN. (But you could also use this in your lab to serve up NFS or iSCSI etc to your lab for shared storage.)
I signed up for a trial and downloaded the OVF. Deploying it was straight forward so no need to describe that, just like any other OVF. After the boot I grabbed the IP Address (we have DHCP in our lab) and did an “https://<ip of appliance/”. Now a setup screen shows up and it allows me to configure it. Fairly simple:
- Click “Setup”
- Click “Next”
- Ensure “Enable CloudArray Portal” is ticked and click Next
- Provide your account details so that the trial license can be pulled from the CloudArray website
- Create an Admin account, I used “administrator”
- Accept the EULA and click Finish
- That was the setup, it will congratulate you and now you can configure it further
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