Before deployment, you might need to prepare DNS records for your NetApp HCI system and gather NTP server information.
Make the following DNS and timeserver preparations before deploying NetApp HCI:
- Create any needed DNS entries for hosts (such as individual compute or storage nodes) and document how the host entries map to the respective IP addresses. During deployment, you will need to assign a prefix to your storage cluster that will be applied to each host; to avoid confusion, keep your DNS naming plans in mind when choosing a prefix.
- If you are deploying NetApp HCI with a new VMware vCenter Server instance using a fully qualified domain name, you must create one Pointer (PTR) record and one Address (A) record for vCenter Server on the given DNS server before deployment.
- If you are deploying NetApp HCI with a new vCenter Server instance using only IP addresses, you do not need to create new DNS records for vCenter Server.
- NetApp HCI requires a valid NTP server for timekeeping. You can use a publicly available time server if you do not have one in your environment.