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Both data centers are connected with dedicated FC WAN connections in a campus-like configuration. A third site, a remote logistic center with IP connectivity to both sites, hosts a witness that can make a decision for failover in event of an outage. This retailer has two Dell Unity All Flash U480Fs running the applications, including VDI components, that use virtualized storage by VPLEX. Each data center has a cluster of VxRail E-Series all-flash nodes, each of which will handle the virtual desktops. This solution is intended to support hundreds of clients using VDI services.
The solution uses a Single VS6 Engine per site with a Connectrix connection as the Storage Area Network (SAN). The sites have dedicated fiber connections and low latency, which makes the solution optimal for VDI. Because of the lower round-trip time (RTT), there is less impact on application response times. The volumes are distributed over these two sites, with the VMware DataStores being handled by Dell Unity storage systems in the backend.
Other best practices, such as witness domain, electrical domains sizing, site interconnection, zoning, and so on, were implemented to avoid disruption and ensure that in case of failures they are segmented and isolated from each other. Active-active solutions require implementation guidelines in which you must account for the failures that the system can handle. For instance, it is important to isolate environments in multiple failure domains to ensure that in an event of an outage failures are isolated to ensure optimal operation.