Design Guide Introduction
The DVD for the APEX Cloud Platform for Azure with PowerFlex consists of two guides. This design guide provides a conceptual and architectural overview of the solution and details the integration testing performed in the Dell Technologies engineering labs. The accompanying implementation guide contains step-by-step instructions for configuring your MC nodes and network infrastructure to consume block storage from PowerFlex clusters.
Throughout the engineering planning and validation efforts, we prioritized the following configuration quality attributes:
- High availability—Avoid single points of failure at the compute, storage, and networking layers.
- Scalability—Enable you to right-size the infrastructure to meet the demands of the current workload profile, while also letting you scale up and out for future growth projections.
- Manageability—Leverage familiar tools to manage the configuration.
- Simplicity—Provide a seamless experience for presenting this new external storage to Azure Stack HCI for IT administrators already familiar with S2D.
Audience
This Dell Validated Design (DVD) Guide is intended for IT experts who are interested in building an optimized Azure hybrid cloud platform that can host a broad set of workload profiles. Organizations considering a migration to Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure from competing solutions may also find this guide very helpful. The guide illustrates how to unlock new use cases by extending Azure Stack HCI to include Dell enterprise-class software-defined storage.
The audience for this guide can include IT managers, system engineers, field consultants, and others with expertise in virtualization and cloud computing.
Disclaimer
This guide may contain language that is not consistent with Dell Technologies’ current guidelines. Dell Technologies plans to update the guide over subsequent future releases to revise the language accordingly.
Terminology
The following table provides definitions for some of the terms that are used in this document:
Term | Definition |
MC Node | Multicloud (MC) nodes are Dell PowerEdge servers that have been intelligently designed and deliberately configured specifically for the APEX Cloud Platforms. For APEX Cloud Platform for Azure, MC nodes run the Azure Stack HCI operating system, which consists of Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct. This guide uses MC node and Azure Stack HCI cluster node interchangeably. |
Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) | Storage Spaces Direct is a software-defined storage feature of Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server that allows you to share storage resources in your hyperconverged IT infrastructure. It enables you to combine internal storage drives on a cluster of physical servers (2 and up to 16) into a software-defined pool of storage. This storage pool has cache, tiers, resiliency, and erasure coding across columns-all configured and managed automatically. |
S2D Storage Pool | The storage pool is the collection of hard drives which form the basis of your software-defined storage in Azure Stack HCI. |
Cluster Shared Volumes | Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) enable multiple nodes in an Azure Stack HCI cluster to simultaneously have read/write access to the same disk. |
Dell PowerFlex | Dell PowerFlex is an enterprise-class software-defined storage solution. With its exceptional performance, scale, and ability to consolidate diverse workloads, PowerFlex instills confidence in your infrastructure to securely deliver under extreme requirements and enables businesses to remain competitive and respond quickly to changing conditions. |
PowerFlex Manager | PowerFlex Manager is the unified management and orchestration platform for Dell PowerFlex with automation to enable high availability, serviceability, scalability, efficiency, and agility. |
Storage Data Client (SDC) | A client kernel driver that provides front-end volume access to operating systems, applications, or hypervisors. It acts like a virtual HBA and presents PowerFlex volumes as local block devices. The SDC maintains peer-to-peer connections with all storage nodes and enables parallel I/O with native multipathing. |
Storage Data Server (SDS) | A software service, running on a PowerFlex node that contributes disks to the storage cluster. Working together, several SDSs abstract local storage, maintain storage pools, and present volumes to the SDCs. Each SDS node is a fault unit, and the distributed mesh-mirror copies of data are never placed on the same fault unit. |
Protection Domain | A logical entity that consists of a group of SDSs that provide data protection for each other. Each SDS belongs to one (and only one) protection domain. By definition, each protection domain is a unique set of SDSs. Protection domains can be added during installation and modified post installation. |
PowerFlex Storage Pool | A set of physical storage devices within a protection domain. Each storage device belongs to one (and only one) storage pool. A volume is distributed over all devices residing in the same storage pool. |