VMware Explore May Look Different, But Dell PowerFlex with Kioxia Drives Will Still Be There.
Fri, 23 Aug 2024 18:15:34 -0000
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“It sure looks different.”
That’s what many have said about this year’s VMware Explore conference. One can easily see this point of view, and why this conference feels different. Truth be told, if conferences were the same every year, no one would attend them. A case of “been there, done that.”
The same is true with the technology. It cannot stand still, it must move forward, it must move us forward. One of these technologies that has been quietly building momentum is NVMe over TCP. It’s been in vSphere for a while, but few have leveraged it in their environment. If you’re interested in moving forward with technology in your environment and are attending VMware Explore, be sure to stop by the Kioxia booth and see NVMe over TCP running on Dell PowerFlex.
Dell PowerFlex is a software defined platform that has supported NVMe over TCP. This allows organizations to take full advantage of the ever-changing technology, so they don’t get left behind.
Kioxia drives are used in PowerFlex nodes to attain optimal performance and you can experience a live demonstration of this at VMware Explore in the Kioxia booth (1336). There you will have the opportunity to meet with both PowerFlex and Kioxia specialists who can guide you through the NVMe landscape and how you can take advantage of it in your organization.
That said let’s get into a bit more of the details of what they will have in the booth for you to see. They will have a rack of gear with about seven PowerFlex nodes in it. The primary storage (SO) nodes (4) all have Kioxia drives that provide storage to a MongoDB deployment running on (3) PowerFlex R7625 compute only (CO) nodes with AMD processors in them. You can see a logical system diagram below.
The R7625 CO nodes have VMware vSphere deployed with VMs configured to run MongoDB. Part of that configuration is setting up the NVMe over TCP adapter on the ESXi hosts. Followed by configuring NVMe over TCP storage on PowerFlex and then adding NVMe storage to the virtual machines. This is similar to the setup process for iSCSI storage in vSphere. Once the configuration is done, you have unlocked NVMe over TCP for your environment.
You can now add NVMe over TCP storage to your VMs in just a slightly different way than before. The difference is you need to add an NVMe controller to your VM. See its not that different, just a little. We did this in our MongoDB environment, and you can see the logical architecture below.
MongoDB architecture
If you are interested in seeing more than just the drives and hardware, you can also see how the environment performs by stopping by the booth.
This part will look different from most of my blogs, normally I’d tell you what you can expect to see in this environment, but I don’t want to spoil it for everyone heading to VMware Explore.
If you want to see how MongoDB performs at VMware Explore, be sure to stop by the Kioxia booth (1336) and visit Shashi. If you can’t join us at VMware Explore, reach out to your Dell representative for more details on PowerFlex. Things may look different, but who wants to see the same things over and over?