creating Microsoft DNS zone delegation with powershell for Isilon SmartConnect

This entry was tagged EMC Isilon Microsoft Powershell Windows Server 2012 R2 and posted on

To prepare a Windows Server 2012 R2 for my Isilon lab I used Powershell v4 to configure the required DNS zone delegation. It turned out to be very easy and saved quite a few “clicks”. Therefore I think it is worth mentioning it in this short post:

For the example I’m using following values:

domain: emc.lab
SmartConnect zone name: isilonc1.emc.lab
SmartConnect Service IP: 192.168.186.20
IP Pool: 192.168.186.21 – .25

The first command Add-DnsServerZoneDelegation is creating the zone delegation for our SmartConnect zone “isilonc1.emc.lab”. Furthermore it does create a A-record for the SmartConnect Service IP with the name “sc-sip.emc.lab” if it does not yet exist.

Add-DnsServerZoneDelegation -Name "emc.lab" -ChildZoneName "isilonc1" -NameServer "sc-sip.emc.lab" -IPAddress 192.168.186.20

Optionally you can create with Add-DnsServerResourceRecordPtr the corresponding PTR for the IP Pool to enable reverse lookups. To do this in one line I created a “for” loop which will create a PTR resolving to “isilonc1.emc.lab” for the IPs ending with 21 to 25.

for ($i=21; $i -le 25; $i++){ Add-DnsServerResourceRecordPtr -Name $i -ZoneName "186.168.192.in-addr.arpa" -PtrDomainName "isilonc1.emc.lab" }

These commands are only available starting with Powershell v4 and Windows Server 2012!

You can find more information to EMC Isilon SmartConnect in this Whitepaper: h8316-wp-smartconnect.pdf

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2 thoughts on “creating Microsoft DNS zone delegation with powershell for Isilon SmartConnect”

    • Reply ↓
      Christopher Banck

      The A records are served by the nameserver specified in the delegation for zone “isilonc1.emc.lab”. This is not a “normal” nameserver, it is an integrated nameserver on the EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS System to achieve a load balancing to its nodes. It does not have to be configured beside entering the zone name.
      I updated the post to include a link to the Isilon SmartConnect Whitepaper.