Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Dell PowerFlex Integration with Apache CloudStack > Logical architecture
The following diagram shows the logical architecture of this solution:
PowerFlex Manager is used to deploy the PowerFlex storage-only (SO) cluster on four bare metal servers followed by the deployment of PowerFlex compute-only (CO) nodes. PowerFlex storage-only cluster deployment is fully automated by the PowerFlex Manager, whereas the PowerFlex CO nodes are deployed manually by installing the KVM hypervisor followed by installing the SDC driver. In further sections, these CO nodes are referred to as KVM hosts.
A single PowerFlex protection domain with multiple storage pools is configured on PowerFlex. The PowerFlex storage pool topology consists of four storage-only nodes with 10 SSD disks in each of the four SO nodes in the PowerFlex system.
A CloudStack installation consists of two parts: the first is the Management Server and the second is the KVM hypervisor, as the managed cloud infrastructure. Once it is configured and managed as CloudStack cloud, resources such as hosts, storage devices, and IP addresses can be provisioned into the Management Server for consumption.
In this white paper, a single Management Server along with three KVM hosts are used for CloudStack setup with basic network configuration.
The PowerFlex SDC driver is installed on each of the KVM hypervisor hosts to enable PowerFlex to serve as the primary storage. The storage plugins feature in the CloudStack Management Server enables the use of PowerFlex storage pool as a managed primary storage for the KVM hypervisor, either as a zone-wide or cluster-wide pool. This pool can be added either from the UI or the API. Whenever VM or any storage related operations are performed, the respective volumes are created at the PowerFlex storage level.
Administrators and users can perform day-to-day operations such as VM provisioning, snapshots, migration, and so on, using the CloudStack UI.
For more information about the configuration of CloudStack and PowerFlex used in this solution, see Configuration details.