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Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere on Dell PowerFlex
Introduction Dell PowerFlex product overview Solution architecture
Solution architecture
Installing an Amazon EKS Anywhere cluster on Dell PowerFlex Creating an Amazon EKS Anywhere cluster Validating the cluster deployment Installing the PowerFlex CSI driver Deployment tests and validation Conclusion Configuration details References

Solution architecture

Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere on Dell PowerFlex > Solution architecture

Solution architecture

  • This section describes how Amazon EKS Anywhere is deployed on a Dell PowerFlex HCI cluster. You can deploy this solution on the Dell PowerFlex family products. 

    Note: The solution that is described in this section is validated in the engineering lab with the specific hardware specification shown in Figure 2.

    The Dell PowerFlex HCI cluster includes four physical servers (each server includes two Intel Xeon Gold 6248R 24-core processors), 192 GB RAM, and five 1.5 TB SSDs. ESXi 7.0.2 is installed on each of the four nodes, which are running PowerFlex SDS and SDC components to provide compute and storage resources. A single protection domain is provisioned from the SSDs on these four SDS systems. A single storage pool and persistent storage volumes are created and assigned to the Kubernetes pods with CSI driver. 


    Figure 2.        Logical architecture of the Amazon EKS Anywhere environment on Dell PowerFlex 

    Pre-requisites to deploy an Amazon EKS Anywhere service include:

    • A PowerFlex environment running VMware vSphere 7.0 or later. 
    • Sufficient capacity to deploy eight to ten Amazon EKS VMs. 
    • A network in the vSphere workload cluster with a DHCP service. The workload VMs must be connected to this network. 
    • Amazon EKS administrative VMs require Internet connectivity to download manifests, OVAs, and the Amazon EKS distribution.

    Initial deployments can start with four PowerFlex nodes and scale to meet the expansion requirements of storage, compute, or both for scalability.

    After the Amazon EKS admin VM is deployed, a command is issued that deploys the workload clusters and creates associated CRD instances on the workload cluster. A single instance is prepared and with some integrated scripting, the system can orchestrate the complex deployment. This scripting greatly simplifies the process when compared to a traditional Kubernetes deployment.   

    When the initial deployment is complete, Amazon provides a test workload that you can use to validate the environment. 

    The validated design is more versatile than a typical Amazon EKS Anywhere deployment. Instead of using the standard VMware CNS-CSI storage provider, the PowerFlex validation uses the Dell PowerFlex CSI plug-in. This validation makes it possible to present PowerFlex storage capabilities directly to Amazon EKS. With the CSI plug-in, it is possible to extend volumes through Amazon EKS, as well as snapshot volumes.

    This design allows IT departments to move toward developer-oriented processes. Developers can work with storage natively. This architecture greatly reduces administrative efforts and saves time. This architecture also eliminates the need to learn different storage management tools and operational processes.

    Beyond storage control in Amazon EKS Anywhere, the results of these operations can be viewed in the PowerFlex management interface. These operations provide an end-to-end view of the environment and allow traditional IT administrators to use familiar tools to manage and monitor their environment. This approach makes it easy for an entire IT organization to move towards a more developer-centric environment.