The concept of domains have been with CLARiiON and (later) VNX arrays since the early part of the 21st Century. The configuration is fairly simple, and, in keeping with the idea that you can do anything with naviseccli, I thought I’d do a quick post on using naviseccli to join SPs to a domain. This assumes you have security setup with your naviseccli environment, and you know the IPs of the SPs you’re trying to add to the domain.

You can the set the master node for a domain with this command. Note that the nominated node can’t be a member of another domain at the time.

naviseccli -h SPA-IP-Address domain -setmaster SPB-IP-Address
 WARNING: You are about to set the following node as the master of the domain: SPB-IP-Address
 Proceed? (y/n) y

If a node is a problem, or you’re about to remove an array from your environment, it’s a good idea to remove it from the domain before you rip it out of the rack.

naviseccli -h SPA-IP-Address domain -remove SPA-IP-Address
 WARNING: You are about to remove the following node from the domain: SPA-IP-Address
 Proceed? (y/n) y

You may also wish to add another couple of nodes, particularly if you have a number of arrays in the environment.

naviseccli -h SPB-IP-Address domain -add SPA-IP-Address
 WARNING: You are about to remove the following node from the domain: SPA-IP-Address
 Proceed? (y/n) y

And that’s it. I recommend you check out EMC’s white paper – Domain Management with EMC Unisphere for VNX (p/n h8853.4) – for more information on VNX domain management.