VCE VxRail Appliance: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance from EMC and VMware

78 Pages·2016·5.01 MB·English

VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE

VCE VXRAIL™ APPLIANCE
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance
from EMC and VMware
® ®

Document H15104
Version 1.0

April, 2016

© 2016 VCE COMPANY, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE

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VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE

Table of Contents
Preface
AUDIENCE ......................................................................................................................... 6
RELATED RESOURCES AND DOCUMENTATION ....................................................................... 6
CONTRIBUTORS ................................................................................................................. 7
CONVENTIONS ................................................................................................................... 7
Introduction
DEPLOYMENT TREND TOWARDS CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE ............................................. 8
DESIGN TREND TOWARDS SDDCs ........................................................................................ 9
HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE ............................................................................... 10
VCE Converged Infrastructure Platforms Overview
BLOCK ARCHITECTURE ..................................................................................................... 13
RACK ARCHITECTURE ....................................................................................................... 14
APPLIANCE ARCHITECTURE ............................................................................................... 14
VCE VXRAIL™APPLIANCE PRODUCT PROFILE ....................................................................... 15
VxRail Hardware Architecture
VXRAIL APPLIANCE CLUSTER ............................................................................................. 17
VxRail Node ..................................................................................................................... 17
VxRail Node Storage Disk Drives ........................................................................................ 19
VXRAIL MODELS AND SPECIFICATIONS .............................................................................. 19
Scaling ........................................................................................................................... 20
VxRail Software Architecture
APPLIANCE MANAGEMENT ................................................................................................. 23
VxRail Manager ................................................................................................................ 23
VxRail Manager Extension ................................................................................................. 23
VMWARE VSPHERE ........................................................................................................... 26
VMware vSphere vCenter Server ........................................................................................ 26
vCenter Server Services and Interfaces ................................................................................. 27
PSC Deployment Options ................................................................................................... 27
VMware vSphere ESXi ....................................................................................................... 28
ESXi Overview ................................................................................................................ 28
Communication between vCenter Server and ESXi Hosts ....................................................... 29
Virtual Machines ............................................................................................................... 30
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VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE

Virtual Machine Hardware .................................................................................................. 31
Virtual Machine Communication .......................................................................................... 31
Virtual Networking ............................................................................................................ 31
Standard Virtual Switch .................................................................................................... 32
Virtual Distributed Switch .................................................................................................. 33
Migration and VMotion ...................................................................................................... 34
Enhanced vMotion Compatibility .......................................................................................... 35
Storage vMotion .............................................................................................................. 35
vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler ............................................................................. 36
vSphere High Availability (HA) ........................................................................................... 38
vCenter Server Watchdog .................................................................................................. 40
vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) ............................................................................................. 41
VIRTUAL SAN .................................................................................................................. 42
Disk Groups ..................................................................................................................... 43
Hybrid and All-Flash Differences ......................................................................................... 44
Read Cache: Basic Function ............................................................................................... 44
Write Cache: Basic Function ............................................................................................... 45
Flash Endurance ............................................................................................................... 45
Virtual SAN’s Impact on Flash Endurance ............................................................................... 45
Client Cache .................................................................................................................... 45
Objects and Components .................................................................................................. 46
Witness ........................................................................................................................ 46
Replicas ........................................................................................................................ 46
Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) .......................................................................... 47
Dynamic Policy Changes .................................................................................................... 47
Storage Policy Attributes ................................................................................................... 47
I/O Paths and Caching Algorithms ...................................................................................... 50
Read Caching ................................................................................................................. 50
Write Caching ................................................................................................................. 52
Distributed Caching Considerations ...................................................................................... 54
Virtual SAN High Availability and Fault Domains ................................................................... 55
Limitations of Two- and Three-Node Configurations .................................................................. 55
Fault Domain Overview ..................................................................................................... 56
Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster ............................................................................................ 57
Site Locality ................................................................................................................... 58
Networking .................................................................................................................... 59
Stretched-Cluster Heartbeats and Site Bias ............................................................................ 59
vSphere HA settings for Stretched Cluster ............................................................................. 59
Snapshots ....................................................................................................................... 59
How Snapshots Work ....................................................................................................... 60
Managing Snapshots ........................................................................................................ 62
Deduplication and Compression ......................................................................................... 62
Advantages of Data-Reduction Technology ............................................................................. 62
In-line Deduplication and Compression per Disk Group .............................................................. 63
Latency and Resource Consumption ..................................................................................... 64
Enabling Deduplication and Compression ............................................................................... 64
Erasure Coding ................................................................................................................ 64
Enabling Erasure Coding ................................................................................................... 66
Requirements ................................................................................................................. 67
Overhead Issues (RAID-5 and RAID-6) ................................................................................. 67

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Integrated Solutions
STORAGE TIERING WITH CLOUDARRAY .............................................................................. 68
INTEGRATED BACKUP AND RECOVERY WITH VSPHERE DATA PROTECTION (VDP) .................... 70
INTEGRATED REPLICATION WITH RECOVERPOINT FOR VIRTUAL MACHINES ........................... 71
Use Case Examples
USE CASE: CREATE IT CERTAINTY FOR VIRTUAL DESKTOP INFRASTRUCTURE (VDI) ................ 72
Meeting the Virtualization Challenge for Federal Agencies .................................................. 73
USE CASE: SIMPLIFYING THE DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISE ENVIRONMENT ............................... 74
Meeting the Distributed Enterprise Challenge for State and Local Agencies ........................... 75
Product Information
PRODUCT SUPPORT .......................................................................................................... 76
EMC PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FOR VXRAIL APPLIANCES ..................................................... 76
VSPHERE ORDERING INFORMATION ................................................................................... 77
WE’D LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOU! ........................................................................................ 77

© 2016 VCE COMPANY, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE

Preface
This EMC TechBook provides a thorough conceptual and architectural review of the VCE VxRail™
Appliance. It reviews current trends in the industry that are driving adoption of converged
infrastructure and highlights the pivotal role of VxRail Appliances in today’s modern data center.
As part of an effort to improve and enhance the performance and capabilities of its product lines,
EMC periodically releases revisions of its hardware and software. Therefore, some functions
described in this document may not be supported by all versions of the software or hardware
currently in use. For the most up-to-date information on product features, refer to the product
release notes. If a product does not function as described in this document, please contact your
EMC representative.
AUDIENCE
This TechBook is intended for EMC field personnel, partners, and customers involved in designing, acquiring,
managing, or operating aVxRail Appliance solution.This TechBook may also be useful for Systems Administrators
and EMC Solutions Architects.
RELATED RESOURCES AND DOCUMENTATION
Refer to the following items for related, supplemental documentation, technical papers, and websites.
 DRS Web Content at https://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/features/distributed-switch#sthash.WC5hSHzt.dpuf
 EMC CloudArray Product Description Guide: https://www.emc.com/collateral/guide/h13456-cloudarray-pdg.pdf
 EMC CloudArray AdministratorGuide: http://uk.emc.com/collateral/TechnicalDocument/docu60786.pdf
 An overview of VMware VSAN Caching Algorithmsathttps://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsan/vmware-
virtual-san-caching-whitepaper.pdf

 vSphere Resource Management athttp:/www.vmware.com/support/pubs
 Virtual SAN 6.2 Stretched Cluster Guideat:http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsan/VMware-Virtual-SAN-6.2-
Stretched-Cluster-Guide.pdf
 Virtual SANSparse—Tech Note for Virtual SAN 6.0 Snapshots at https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/
SAN
 vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide at https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-
server-6-pubs.html
 Blogs, web pages, publications, and multimedia content from http://www.hyperconverged.org/

© 2016 VCE COMPANY, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE

CONTRIBUTORS
Along with other EMC and VMware engineers, field personnel, and partners, the following individuals have been
contributors to this TechBook:
Flavio Fomin
Bill Leslie
Arron Lock
Joe Vukson
Sam Huang
Aleksey Lib
Violin Zhang
Colin Gallagher
Megan McMichael
Hanoch Eiron
Gail Riley
Jim Wentworth
CONVENTIONS
EMC uses the following type style conventions in this document.
Normal—Used in running (nonprocedural) text for
 Names of interface elements, such as names of windows, dialog boxes, buttons, fields, and menus
 Namesofresources,attributes,pools,Booleanexpressions,DQL statements, keywords, clauses, environment variables,
functions, and utilities 

 URLs,pathnames,filenames,directorynames,computer names, links, groups, file systems, and notifications 

Bold—Used in running (nonprocedural) text for names of commands, daemons, options, programs, processes,
services, applications, utilities, kernels, notifications, system calls, and man pages.
Italic: Used in all text (including procedures) for

 Full titles of publications referenced in text
 Emphasis, for example, a new term
 Policies and variables
Courier: Used for:

 System output, such as an error message or script 

 URLs, complete paths, filenames, prompts, and syntax when shown outside of running text


© 2016 VCE COMPANY, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE

Introduction
The IT infrastructure market is undergoing unprecedented transformation. The most significant transformation is
reflected by two major trends: Adeployment trend toward converged infrastructure and a design trend toward
software-defined data centers (SDDCs). Both are responses to the IT realities of infrastructure clutter, complexity,
and high cost; they represent attempts to simplify IT and reduce the overall cost of infrastructure ownership.
Today’s infrastructure environments are typically comprised of multiple hardware and software products from
multiple vendors, with each product offering a different management interface and requiring different training. Each
product in this type of legacy stack is likely to be grossly overprovisioned, using its own resources (CPU, memory,
and storage) to address the intermittent peak workloads of resident applications. The value of a single shared
resource pool, offered by server virtualization, is still generally limited to the server layer. All other products are
islands of overprovisioned resources that are not shared. Therefore, low utilization of the overall stack results in the
ripple effects of high acquisition, space, and power costs. Too many resources can be wasted in legacy
environments.
DEPLOYMENT TREND TOWARDS CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE
(CI)
Industry-infrastructure deployment has shifted from a build to a buy approach. This shift is being driven by the
need for IT to focus limited economic resources on driving business innovation. While a build-your-own strategy can
achieve a productive IT infrastructure, these deployments can be difficult and lengthy to implement and vulnerable
to higher operating costs,and they’re susceptible to greater risk related to component integration, configuration,
qualification, compliance, and management. Converged infrastructure (CI) packages compute, storage, and
networking components into a single optimized IT solution. CI is a simple, fast, and effective alternative to build-
your-own and has been widely adopted.

CI typically brings together blade-servers, enterprise storage arrays, storage area networks, IP networking,
virtualization, and management software into a single product. CI means that multiple pre-engineered and pre-
integrated components operate under a single controlled converged architecture with a single point of management
and a single source for end-to-end support. CI provides a localized single resource pool that enables a higher
overall resource utilization than with a legacy island-based infrastructure. Overall acquisition cost is lower and
© 2016 VCE COMPANY, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE

management is simplified. In the data center, CI typically has a smaller footprint with less cabling and can be
deployed much faster than traditional infrastructure.
DESIGN TREND TOWARDS
SOFTWARE-DEFINED DATA CENTERS (SDDCs)
Traditional data centers are hardware-centric. Emerging data centers are software-centric. While the concept is still
evolving, a software-defined data center (SDDC) is a software-centric architectural approach based on virtualization
and automation. To logically define all infrastructure services, the SDDC applies the widely successful principles of
server virtualization—abstraction, isolation, and pooling—to the remaining network and storage infrastructure
services. SDDC management is automated through policy-based software which controls both on-premises and off-
premises resources. With SDDC, traditional enterprise applications can be supported in a more flexible and cost
effective manner. SDDC represents the epitome of the agile digital business model, where pooled resources adapt
and respond to shifting application requirements.

Figure 1: SDDC
Virtualized servers are probably the most well-known software-defined IT entity, where hypervisors running on a
cluster of hosts allocate hardware resources to virtual machines (VMs). In turn, VMs can function with a degree of
autonomy from the underlying physical hardware. Software-defined storage (SDS) and software-defined
networking (SDN) are based on a similar premise: Physical resources are aggregated and dynamically allocated
based on predefined policies with software abstracting control from the underlying hardware. The result is the
logical pooling of compute, storage, and networking resources. Physical servers function as a pool of CPU resources
hosting VMs, while network bandwidth is aggregated into logical resources, and pooled storage capacity is allocated
by specified service levels for performance and durability.
Once the data center has abstracted resources, SDDC services make the data center remarkably adaptable and
responsive to business demands. In addition to virtualized infrastructure, the SDDC includes automation, policy-
based management, and hybrid cloud services. The policy-based model insulates users from the underlying
commodity technology, and policies balance and coordinate resource delivery. Resources are allocated where
needed, absorbing utilization spikes while maintaining consistent and predictable performance. Conceptually, SDDC
encompasses more than the IT infrastructure itself; it also represents an essential departure from traditional
methods of delivering and consuming IT resources. Infrastructure, platforms, and software have become services,
and SDDC is the fundamental mechanism that underpins the most sophisticated cloud services. The most effective
SDDC deployments are based on technology that provides simple implementation, administration, and
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VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE

management. This requires an infrastructure solution with an extremely high level of efficiency and serviceability,
such as hyper-converged infrastructure.
HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is the next level of converged infrastructure. HCI is a new type of CI with a
software-centric architecture based on smaller, industry-standard building-block servers that can be scaled. HCI
has a software-defined architecture with everything virtualized. Compute, storage, and networking functions are
decoupled from the underlying infrastructure and run on a common set of physical resources that are based on
industry-standard components. Hyper-converged systems do not include separate enterprise storage arrays.
Instead, they adopt industry-standard server platforms with local direct-attached storage (DAS), which is
virtualized using software-defined storage technology. (See Figure 2 below.) By integrating these technologies,
HCI systems are managed as a single system through a common toolset.
The ideal HCI solution integrates thesebuilding-block servers with a familiar, simple management software for
reliability and serviceability. This enables efficient and safe use of commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware.
Simple management software allows a common operational model, which drives efficiency and enables workload
mobility. Other benefits of HCI include a lower total cost of operation as well as flexible scalability—nodes, which
provide both CPU and storage, can easily be added to meet business demands. Unlike CI, the technologies in HCI
are so integrated that they cannot be broken down into separate components for independent use. HCI offers a
seamless framework of integrated, virtualized, scalable nodes with built-in management.

Figure 2: CI and HCI
HCI carries forward the benefits of CI, including a single shared resource pool,and takes them even further. By
reinventing the underlying data architecture, HCI includes full data services. Complete integration and innovation at
the software layer allows for radically simple end-to-end data management. Deploying new infrastructure, which
could take up to a week in the build-your-own model, can be up and running in under 30 minutes, because HCI
offers such high levels of task automation. Ideally, HCI is fully integrated, preconfigured, and tested. This provides
a simple, cost effective, non-disruptive scalable solution with centralized management functionality, rich data
services, and a single source of support.
HCI enables faster, better, and simpler management of consolidated workloads, virtual desktops, business-critical
applications, and remote office infrastructure.
HCI solutions have distinct features including scalability, simplicity, and data services.
Scalability. Hyper-converged infrastructures are designed to scale out by adding nodes, which provides a
predictable ―pay-as-you-grow‖ approach. Adding nodes rather than separately adding CPUs or storage capacity,
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