I wrote about Cohesity Helios back in October and this week finally started to use Helios to manage my virtual cluster. Helios is a SaaS offering for managing a collection of Cohesity clusters from a central location. For today I only have a single cluster to manage so there is a simple process to add the cluster to Helios. I posted a video of the process, showing my first time using Helios and how it was very simple to get started. I talk about IT simplification a lot, this is definitely easy to operate.
Disclosure: This post is part of my work with Cohesity.
Step one – Upgrade your cluster
The minimum supported cluster version for Helios support if 6.0.1c, I upgraded my cluster to 6.1.1a since it is the latest release available today. Refer to my earlier post and video about the upgrade process. 
Step Two – Enable Helios access
Your updated cluster will not automatically get the ability to connect to Helios, you will need to have the Cohesity support team enable Helios access on your cluster, then you will get a Helios link in the top menu bar.
Step Three – Connect to Helios
Click that Helios icon and click the “Enable” button, maybe click the “View Only” button if you don’t want configuration changes to be made from Helios. I would like to use Helios as my main point of control, so I leave “View Only” disabled.
You will be prompted to authenticate with your Cohesity support credentials to associate this cluster with your support account, Helios uses your support account for authentication. Then it will take a few minutes for your cluster to update Helios and your cluster details to be available in Helios.
Step Four – Use Helios
Open a new tab to https://helios.cohesity.com/ and logon with your support credentials, your cluster will be available and will look exactly the same as it does through the local interface on your cluster.
We went from on-site only management to SaaS management from anywhere in a matter of minutes.
Step Five – Repeat for each cluster
Helios does help me manage my Cohesity cluster from anywhere, but its real value will come when I have multiple clusters managed from a single place. I will be taking a look at that in a future video when I have my second lab cluster operational.
© 2019, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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