How to Deploy Dell EMC ECS Community Edition in Your Home Lab

When working with enterprise systems, it is always good to have a lab system that you can easily try  and break things. Today, I will be writing about one of my favorite products, Dell EMC ECS, which is sometimes scary when I need to perform some uncommon things.

I am following the GitHub website for Dell EMC ECS Community Edition, for the latest release and install this version.

Today, the most recent version available is 3.7.0.0 and you may directly download the OVA file from here. You may also read the Release Notes but dont forget that this article is aimed for Community Edition, thus keep in mind that this will be an unsupported deployment and purposed for lab and testing basically. For the enterprise Dell EMC ECS products, you may visit Dell Technologies website.

OK, lets continue with the deployment. I assume you have the OVA file already downloaded and ready to be deployment.

In my Vmware Workstation setup, I do click on File > Open and select the OVA file to deploy.

Provide the name and path for the OVA file.

Click Import

After the Import successfully completes, we can see the Virtual Machine is created. Eventough, the specs are shown below are the OVA defaults, you can also set to Memory to 16GB which is the minimum recommended.

Due to my system resources are limited, I am only deploying single OVA. If you would like to experience Erasure Encoding, then you will need to deploy 4 VMs.

Next, we will need to power on the VMs. For the IP configuration, you can use static IP address, which is the preferred one, as well as DHCP. 

• When using static IP Address, you may use nmtui command to configure static IP Address.
• Dont forget to make MAC Address Reservations to fix the IP Addresses for the VMs.

Lets first login to the VM from the console and I am planning to configure Static IP Address. The credential to login is admin:ChangeMe

After configuring the IP Address, we can continue with Putty or with your favorite SSH Client.

From now on, we are going to build the ECS System and there are 3 steps to run.

1. Edit the deploy.yaml file via videploy command
2. Deploying ECS Nodes via ova-step1
3. Deploying ECS Topology via ova-step2

To have a successfull installation you need to carefully edit deploy.yaml file. If possible you may create a VM snapshot here to be able to easy recovery back to a stable state. 

Before editing deploy.yaml, we will need to get some information from the ECS.

1. The IP Address we set on the VM
   you may run "ip addr show" or ifconfig
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. The disk which will be used for ECS Storage Pool
   you may run "sudo fdisk -l | grep dev", you will see an unused disk, which you will need to provide in deploy.yaml file. Here, I will be using /dev/sdb
   
   
   
   
   
   

You need to run videploy to edit deploy.yaml file. This is basically a vi editor, you will need to press 'i' to enter to the INSERT mode to be able to make edits. 

Below, you will see the edited version of the deploy.yaml file. I removed the comment lines to save some space. Basically the lines I edited are as follows and you may leave the rest unchanged. The full path of the deploy.yaml file is /opt/emc/ecs-install/deploy.yml

After you are done with editing, you may save and quit the file with ESC and ":wq". After saving the file Ansible starts to recreate the ECS install data container and expect to see no errors. If you see any errors, return to the videploy file and edit accordingly. Otherwise you may restore your saved snapshot to be able to start from the beginning.

This moment, we are done with editing deploy.yaml file, and we can proceed to run ova-step1

In this step, you should be able to login to ECS Portal. Just check whether you can access the login page or not.

You can skip the last step, running ova-step2, and login here and configure everything manually. But it is easy to run ova-step2 to have the ECS configured all over.

This step may take around 15-20 minutes. Please be patient and wait for the command completes.

Now you can login to the ECS Portal using credentail root:ChangeMe and navigate inside the menus. You will see everything configured in the deploy.yaml file in the ECS Portal. You will be first asked to Accept the agreements and change the default root password for ECS Portal (webui) and you will be asked to relogin using the new password and redirect you to login page.

After logging in with the new password, the ECS Portal Dashboard welcomes you. 

I will be writing another blog for the ECS Portal, but now this is all regarding the ECS Community Edition deployment. Hope you will enjoy this blog.

Thanks for reading...