Converged Infrastructure D-PWF-OE-00 Full Course Free

Note: In the context of PowerFlex exams, there is often a distinction between "Lifecycle Management" (PowerFlex Manager) and "Block Storage Operations" (GUI/Presentation Server).

GUI (Option C): The PowerFlex Web UI (often accessed via the Presentation Server or the unified dashboard in v4) is the primary tool for Day-to-Day tasks. This includes mapping volumes to hosts, taking snapshots, monitoring IOPS, and checking capacity usage. It provides the visual topology of the storage.

PowerFlex Manager (D): While modern versions unify this, historically and in exam logic, PFxM is the tool for deployment, upgrades, and hardware alerts (Lifecycle), whereas the "GUI" is for storage management.

The CLI (B) is used for scripting and advanced tasks, but the GUI is the standard for general daily operations.

3 Nodes: While you can technically install the SDS software on a single server, to create a functioning Storage Pool and a valid PowerFlex cluster that supports the standard 2-copy mesh-mirroring protection scheme, a minimum of 3 SDS nodes is required.

Why? Data is divided into chunks (Primary and Secondary).

Chunk A Primary goes to Node 1.

Chunk A Secondary goes to Node 2.

If Node 1 fails, the system needs a third node (Node 3) to rebuild the missing copy from Node 2 to restore redundancy. A 2-node cluster cannot rebuild data if one node fails (nowhere to put the copy), leaving it permanently degraded.

While "alerting" is a broad topic, in the context of security:

Notify administrators of potential security issues (Option B): The alerting system is designed to trigger notifications for security-relevant events. Examples include:

Failed Login Attempts: Repeated failures which might indicate a brute-force attack.

Unauthorized Access: Connections from unapproved IPs (if restrictions are set).

Certificate Expiry: Warning that SSL/TLS certificates are about to expire, which would break secure management connections.

Encryption Failures: Alerts if a SED drive is unlocked or CloudLink key retrieval fails.

A standard PowerFlex cluster requires a minimum of 3 nodes to ensure high availability and proper functioning of the management stack.

This requirement is driven by two main architectural factors:

MDM Redundancy: The Management and Control Plane (MDM cluster) requires a minimum of three members to form a quorum and handle failover scenarios: a Primary MDM, a Secondary MDM, and a Tie-Breaker MDM.

Mesh Mirroring Data Protection: PowerFlex creates two copies of every data chunk (Primary and Secondary). To ensure that data remains available even if one node fails—and to allow for successful rebuilding of data—a minimum of 3 nodes is required. If a cluster only had 2 nodes and one failed, the survivor would have the only copy of data, but would have nowhere to "rebuild" the missing redundancy to, leaving the cluster in a permanently degraded state until the node returns.