This section provides an overview of the network design for the PowerFlex rack R640 servers with VMware vSphere 6.5:

Each PowerFlex rack node contains:

• 4*25 GB port connections. In this 2*25 GB connection is used for PowerFlex traffic and 2*25 GB connection is used for rest of the network including hypervisor management, vMotion, VM network, Oracle RAC public, and private network.
• 1*1 Gbps for Management (IPMI)
• Link connections are aggregate bandwidth
• Traffic separation and QOS/COS is preconfigured to maintain systems availability and performance

Each PowerFlex rack node connects to dedicated data path switches to enable maximum system bandwidth with fault tolerance.

Figure 4.              PowerFlex rack networking

For a PowerFlex configuration that uses a hyperconverged architecture with two data networks, you typically have two PowerFlex data networks that are defined with the PowerFlex data network type. The PowerFlex data network type supports both SDC and SDS communications.

In an ESXi environment, the PowerFlex SDS is deployed in a special VM called Storage VM (SVM). A Storage VM’s (SVMs) must have a management IP address and another address for the data network. The data network is where traffic flows between SDSs and SDCs (for read/writes) and SDSs to SDSs (for rebuild and rebalance).