Home > Integrated Products > VxBlock 1000 and 3-Tier Platform Reference Architectures > Guides > 3-Tier Platform Design Guide > Business continuity
Dell Integrated Data Protection provides business continuity services through VPLEX and related technologies.
VPLEX delivers enhanced availability, characterized by zero loss of data and near-zero application downtime. VPLEX also delivers enhanced mobility, which is the migration of applications and data between systems without the overhead of work, planning, and downtime that is associated with traditional migrations.
A VPLEX cluster resides in the data path between the converged system servers and storage, where it can create data copies. Copies are created locally or over distance and read and write access is available.
VPLEX enables dynamic workload mobility and continuous availability within and between converged systems over distance. VPLEX also provides simultaneous access to storage devices at two sites through the creation of VPLEX distributed virtual volumes (vVols), which are supported on each side by a VPLEX cluster.
The VPLEX integrated data protection cluster for converged systems uses the following components and technologies:
Dell supports the following VPLEX systems for integrated data protection solutions:
The Cluster Witness observes the state of the clusters and can distinguish between an outage of the intercluster link and a cluster failure. The Cluster Witness uses this information together with the preconfigured detach-rules to guide the clusters to resume or suspend I/O.
The following table describes VPLEX use cases in converged systems:
Table 63. VPLEX use cases in converged systems
Use case | Description |
Mobility | Enables data mobility and relocation between storage arrays that are located in converged systems in a single data center, or between converged systems in two remote data centers, without impacting users. |
Collaboration | Provides efficient real-time data collaboration over distance for big data applications. |
VPLEX Metro HA without cross-connect | Reduces the recovery time objective (RTO) by combining VPLEX Metro HA with VMware HA. Virtual machines automatically restart after a failure. |
VPLEX Metro HA with cross-connect | Eliminates RTOs for most of the failure scenarios. The only failure scenario that causes a virtual machine restart is a host failure. |
MetroPoint (VPLEX VS6 only) | MetroPoint combines VPLEX Metro and RecoverPoint to create a three-site or four-site solution that provides the best of both products for converged systems, including continuous availability, operational and disaster recovery, and continuous data protection. |
The metro node hardware platform is based on the PowerEdge R640 server platform. Metro node is designed with embedded management services, I/O path simplification, and 32 Gbps FC connectivity.
Metro node supports the same use cases as the VPLEX VS6 platform with the following exceptions:
Note: Support for IPv6 is scheduled for a future metro node release.
Metro node is available in a two-node cluster only (single engine). By contrast, the VPLEX VS6 scales out to dual and quad engines. Like the VPLEX VS6, Metro node supports both the Local and the Metro configurations.
Note: Effective January 23, 2023, the VPLEX VS6 is offered only as a single engine configuration for both Local and Metro configurations. Dual and quad engine configurations are no longer sold.
The VPLEX product is offered for sale in the following models:
The following table shows the VPLEX VS6 and metro node hardware specifications for converged systems:
Table 64. VPLEX VX6 and metro node specifications for converged systems
Specification item | VPLEX VS6 | Dell metro node |
Processor generation | Intel Haswell dual 6-core per director | Dual Intel Xeon Silver 4208 CPUs (8 cores per CPU) per node |
DRAM capacity | 128 GB per director | 64 GB per node |
Front end/Back end | 16 Gbps FC | 32 Gbps FC |
Interconnect | 40 Gbps InfiniBand | N/A |
WAN | 16 Gbps FC, 10 GbE | 10 GbE |
Management server | Integrated internal server module, dual MMCS | Management services run on Metro node nodes. A separate management server is not required. |
Rack Configuration | Single (effective 01-23-1923) | Single |
Rack Density | 20U for Single | 2U for single |
A VPLEX cluster consists of the following hardware components:
Note: Metro node no longer uses the “engine” term or context. This design guide uses the term as a reference point.
The following figure shows the VPLEX VS6 engine management and I/O modules:
Figure 14. VPLEX VS6 engine management and I/O modules
A single metro node cluster has two directors.
The following figure shows one metro node director:
Figure 15. Metro node engine
Note: The fiber connections on HBA2 (FC3 and FC4) are inverted from HBA1 (FC1 and FC2).
The following table shows Dell-recommended configurations for business continuity and workload mobility:
Table 65. Recommended integrated data protection configurations
Configuration | Description |
Non cross-cluster connect (VPLEX Metro Stretched) | Servers in this configuration access data from the local VPLEX system only. A non cross-cluster configuration:
For a VPLEX Metro Stretched configuration, you can deploy a non cross-cluster, where the clusters are separated by a latency of less than a 5 millisecond round-trip time (RTT). |
Cross-cluster connect | Servers in this configuration can access data from the VPLEX system at either site. Cross-cluster connect is suitable for deployment in a campus, or in multiple isolated zones in a single data center. This configuration does not require a server failover when an entire storage cluster (VPLEX) or the underlying storage goes down. VPLEX cross-connect is configured at the host layer only and does not imply any cross-connection of the back-end storage. A cross-cluster configuration:
|
VPLEX and metro node support only the FC protocol. In a vSphere environment, VPLEX and metro node support only VMFS datastores.
VPLEX and metro node do not support VMware vVols data stores.