One of the new features that were added to VxRail in the latest 7.0.130 release was the ability to build cluster and add nodes without using the zero-touch configuration. So what is the zero-touch configuration and why would I not want to use it? The Zero-touch configuration uses IPV6 Multicast on the top of rack switches and protocol called loudmouth on the VxRail appliances to auto-discover the appliances and has the hardware profile populated in VxRail manager DB. Once discovered the nodes are used to build a cluster or to expand an existing cluster. For security reasons, the Multicast Traffic is encapsulated in an isolated VLAN that only needs to reside on the TOR switches and does not need to extend into the core network. This method requires no administrative overhead and as suggested by the name it is pretty much plug and play. In certain networks due to internal policies, they cannot enable IPV6 Multicast in the Networking layer. So this manual method will allow VxRail clusters to run without leveraging loudmouth or IPV6 Multicast. A common misconception is that an IPV6 address is required to leverage the zero-touch configuration. This is NOT the case, only the IPv6 Multicast Protocol that is used.
