7 Planning your data center resources

In addition to ensuring that your environment meets the prerequisites for installation of the appliance, there are other planning tasks you might want to complete before adding data center resources. By completing these planning tasks, you can create a data center configuration that takes full advantage of the appliance features and is easier for your administrators to monitor and manage.

7.1 How many data centers?

An appliance data center resource represents a physically contiguous area in which racks containing IT equipment are located. You create data centers in the appliance to describe a lab floor or a portion of a computer room, which provides a useful grouping to summarize your environment and its power and thermal requirements.

Using data centers to describe the physical topology and power systems of your environment is optional. If you choose to create multiple data centers, consider including data center information in your other resource names to enable you to use the appliance search capabilities to filter results by data center.

7.2 Security planning

This section recommends security decisions you might want to make before you install the appliance or bring hardware under management.

To learn about the security features of the appliance, and for general information about protecting the appliance, see “Understanding the security features of the appliance” (page 45).

7.2.1 Choosing an Administrator password

During installation you must change the password for the Administrator user, which is a user with Infrastructure administrator privileges. The default password cannot be used again.

For guidelines on choosing passwords, see “Best practices for maintaining a secure appliance” (page 46).

7.2.2 Choosing the LAN for the appliance

The appliance is designed to operate entirely on an isolated management LAN. Access to the production LAN is not required. Isolating the management LAN from the production LAN helps to keep the production LAN secure.

For more information about security for management and production LANs, see “Best practices for maintaining a secure appliance” (page 46).

7.2.3 Choosing whether or not to enable support access

This product contains a technical feature that will allow an on-site authorized support representative to access your system, through the system console, to assess problems that you have reported. This access will be controlled by a password generated by HP that will only be provided to the authorized support representative. You can disable access at any time while the system is running.

As part of the appliance installation, you must choose whether or not to enable access by support personnel. To change this setting, see “Managing the appliance settings” (page 155).

7.2.4 Choosing an SNMP read community string

Network management systems use SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to monitor network-attached devices. The appliance uses SNMP to retrieve information from managed devices. You specify a read community string that serves as a credential to verify access to the SNMP data on managed devices.

7.1 How many data centers? 79