Edge manufacturing systems can support a highly consolidated environment when running on VxRail. Various factories and plants supported by such environments have different priorities and service level requirements. These differences make them multi-tier, ranging from mission-critical manufacturing operations to mid-tier and low-tier for production, development, QA, and reporting.

VxRail with VMware vSAN, vMotion, DRS, and other data services provide a flexible way to deploy ISVs applications on VMs. Such deployments can use different storage capacity profiles, CPU, memory and storage resources, and access to storage and compute. They leverage customizable policies to control the resources while being highly available and fault tolerant. VxRail is also a highly consolidated environment, so it can support multi-tier applications ranging from mission critical to midtier, and even DEV/QA and reporting applications. Using VM cloning coupled with application-level configuration profiles, it is easy to create and refresh these environments from production applications on demand. In multi-tier environments, design choices for service level management for manufacturing edge solutions on VxRail include the following:

• Identify the performance and storage needs of the ISV application stack and define the service profiles. Consider the following to determine appropriate service levels:
  • Interdependencies
  • Resource requirements
  • Data protection
  • High availability requirements
  • Number of connected users
  • Number of factories, work units, and devices
  • Conditions under which the systems operate
• Some ISVs' applications use store and forward buffers to handle disconnected scenarios by leveraging local files while data repositories are not available. Depending on the workload profiles of these applications, select appropriate persistent store and forward buffer sizes, as well as VxRail datastores with desired policies to meet latency and throughput requirements for datastores.
• The default VxRail vMotion policies, which often govern live migrations and load balancing based on CPU and memory resource contention, might be suitable for most applications; but host rules customizations are possible for host or VM affinity so that they move together.