Note: This section is only relevant if you plan to enable the VxRail remote support feature to connect to Dell Customer Support centers.
VxRail supports network connectivity to Dell’s Customer Support systems, which enables health monitoring, real-time analytics, event notification, and remote support when necessary. If you plan to enable VxRail to connect to Dell back-end Customer Support centers, you can select one of two options. One option is to have VxRail Manager connect to the back-end services sites directly. The other option is to use a centralized instance or pool of Secure Connect Gateways for this purpose.
Figure 44. Enabling call-home connectivity with Secure Connect Gateway
If you already have Secure Connect Gateway deployed in your data center to support this service, known as “call-home,” for other Dell products, this same pool of gateway servers can be used for VxRail. If this is your first Dell product you plan to connect to this service, complete the prerequisites:
If you do not have any Secure Connect Gateways deployed, the product is customer-installable, and can be downloaded from the Dell support site. Each instance of Secure Connect Gateway will require an IP address. VxRail Manager must be able to reach these gateways in your data center to complete the connection to the back-end customer service centers.
Versions of VxRail earlier than 7.0.350 connected to a Secure Remote Services virtual appliance in the data center to enable alerts from VxRail to be sent to Dell customer service. Starting with version 7.0.350, Secure Remote Services is no longer needed for this purpose, and is replaced by a service internal to VxRail Manager. This internal VxRail service will support connectivity directly to the back-end customer service sites, or to Secure Connect Gateways.
If you are deploying VxRail with a version earlier than 7.0.350, you can decide whether to use an existing Secure Remote Services instance in your data center to support call-home or deploy a virtual instance of Secure Remote Services on the VxRail cluster for this purpose. If you choose to deploy the Secure Remote Services virtual appliance on the VxRail cluster, you will have to connect the virtual appliance to the same network as VxRail Manager.