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PowerFlex software-defined storage offers flexibility to help best meet the specific deployment and architectural requirements. PowerFlex can be deployed in a two-layer or single layer (Hyper Converged Infrastructure) architecture. In this reference architecture, PowerFlex is deployed using a two-layer architecture.
This section provides details regarding the components that are involved in this sample reference architecture solution. The design consists of a PowerFlex two-layer configuration with compute nodes running VMware ESXi hypervisor and storage nodes running embedded operating system. RHEL 8.4 VMs are installed on the ESXi compute cluster (one VM per compute node) where the MariaDB server was installed. These database instances are standalone and not clustered.