Ready Stack Architecture

Compute

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 is a modular chassis infrastructure that accommodates a variety of compute and storage sled combinations that are connected by high-speed fabrics, sharing power, cooling, and OME Modular Edition systems management. The chassis features two-socket and four-socket servers with the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family (Skylake-EP) and up to 24 or 48 DIMMs, 12 Gb/s SAS storage sleds, and a choice of networking switch I/O modules.

The following figure shows the front view of the MX7000 infrastructure. From left to right are four 2-socket and one 4-socket blades, and two storage sleds.

Figure 2.         PowerEdge MX7000 front view

The following figure shows the rear view of the infrastructure. From top to bottom are two 25 GbE Fabric A switches, two Fabric B switch blanks, two Fabric C SAS switches, and two management modules.

Figure 3.         PowerEdge MX7000 rear view

The MX7000 and MX Series portfolios, part of the 14G server line, have the same foundational elements and benefits of the 14G portfolio. They provide:

• The traditional advantages of modular design, including a single management console for all components and multiple chassis, cable aggregation, and density
• A disaggregated architecture that enables you to allocate on-demand ratios of shared pools of compute, storage, and fabric

This architecture provides for optimal utilization and flexibility, and maximum productivity and availability.

The MX7000 blade enclosure and its compute, storage, and networking components create a portfolio that can support nearly all workloads. It is especially well suited for workloads that require flexibility in assigning the appropriate ratios of compute, storage, and networking, and the ability to easily change these ratios as workload demands change.

The MX7000 is designed to optimize application performance and ensure a stable environment with intuitive tools that enable simplification and automation throughout the entire server life cycle. Every data center and virtual environment has unique requirements, and PowerEdge servers provide the flexibility that is required to build scalable infrastructure that is tightly integrated with VMware vSphere.

The following table provides a summary of the features of the MX7000 blade enclosure.

Table 1.           MX7000 blade enclosure features

PowerEdge MX7000 administration

Embedded in every PowerEdge server is the next generation of remote server administration, iDRAC9 with Lifecycle Controller. iDRAC9 provides secure and remote server access for a multitude of common management functions. iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller operates regardless of operating system state or the presence of a hypervisor. It offers a complete set of server management features including configuration, operating system deployment, firmware updates, health monitoring, and maintenance.

iDRAC9 provides a variety of remote connectivity interfaces and protocols, enabling administrators to securely configure, deploy, manage, monitor, and update the server. IPMI, Redfish, SMASH-CLP, and WS-Man are just a few of the common standard management interfaces that iDRAC9 supports.

The iDRAC9 HTML5 web UI provides for secure connectivity through HTTPS. With the Group Manager feature in iDRAC9 Enterprise, administrators can create a one-to-many console experience, which enables them to view and manage a set of servers rather than visually inspecting servers for faults and manually managing the servers. Combined with OME Modular Edition, iDRAC9 enables multichassis management in a one-to-many interface.

Networking

Network design is a key aspect of the Ready Stack architecture and consists of these functional groups:

• OOB network
• LAN
• SAN

The key building block of the OOB network is the Dell EMC S4148T-ON switch, which provides 48 ports of 10GBase-T and multiple uplink port options. Using two S4148T-ON switches—referred to as the management switches—provides redundancy.

The key building block for the LAN is the Dell EMC S5232-ON switch, which provides up to 72 ports of 25 GbE or up to 48 ports of 25 GbE and 6 ports of 100 GbE. Using two S5232-ON switches—referred to as the top-of-rack (ToR) switches—provides redundancy. The management hosts, which are rackmount servers, are directly connected to the ToR switches through built-in NICs.

The platform and compute hosts, which are blade servers that are installed in the MX7000, are a different case. Inside the MX7000, a unified connection carries both LAN and SAN traffic. This traffic must be separated before leaving the MX7000 chassis. This separation occurs in the Dell EMC MX9116n Fabric Switching Engine (FSE), which is installed in the back of the MX7000 chassis. The FSE connects to both the LAN (at the ToR switch) and the SAN. Two MX9116n FSEs, one per MX7000 chassis, provide redundancy in a two-chassis configuration. In addition, the Ready Stack includes Dell EMC MX7116n Fabric Expansion Modules (FEMs)—one per MX7000 chassis, in a two- chassis configuration—to provide blade-server connection redundancy.

The key building block of the SAN is the Dell EMC MDS Series FC switch. The SAN can be configured as a core-edge or edge-core-edge, depending on the specific requirements. For the specific models used in our Ready Stack configurations, see Design configurations and specifications on page 20.

Storage

The Dell EMC PowerMax family of storage systems provides simplicity, modern design, and flexible deployments. PowerMax systems implement an integrated architecture for block, file, and VMware VVols, with concurrent support for native NAS, iSCSI, and FC protocols. The PowerMax systems support file and block environments, point-in-time snapshots and thin clones, synchronous and asynchronous replication, built-in encryption, tiering to the cloud, and deep ecosystem integration with VMware, Microsoft, and OpenStack.

The PowerMax family consists of two models, as shown in the following figure. The PowerMax 2000 is designed to provide efficiency and maximum flexibility in a 20-U footprint. The flagship PowerMax 8000 is designed for massive scale, performance, and I/O density, all within a two-floor-tile footprint.

Figure 4.         PowerMax platforms

Both PowerMax models have at their foundation the Dynamic Virtual Matrix architecture and the PowerMaxOS 5978 operating system for the NVMe platform. PowerMaxOS can run natively on both PowerMax systems and, as an upgrade, on legacy VMAX All Flash systems. As with the previous generation of VMAX All Flash systems, PowerMax systems are all-flash arrays–products specifically targeted to meet the storage capacity and performance requirements of the all-flash enterprise data center.

The PowerMax products are feature-rich, all-flash offerings with specific capabilities that are designed to take advantage of the higher capacity NVMe flash drives that are used in the densest configuration possible. PowerMax platforms offer enterprise customers trusted data services, along with improved simplicity, capacity, and performance that their highly virtualized environments demand, while still meeting the economic needs of the more traditional storage workloads. In addition, PowerMax systems enable customers to deploy applications that demand lower storage latency and higher I/O densities, such as real-time analytics, machine learning, and Big Data.

PowerMax systems offer these primary benefits:

• An end-to-end NVMe storage design that provides superior I/O density in a system with a small footprint
• A data storage interface that supports next-generation data storage media
• Efficient workload consolidation for block, file, and mainframe workloads on a single platform
• Ultra-high reliability, availability, and serviceability
• Superior data services including advanced data reduction using inline deduplication and compression

Based on HTML 5, Dell EMC Unisphere storage management delivers the simplification, flexibility, and automation that are required to accelerate the transformation to the modern data center. For customers who frequently build up and tear down storage configurations, Unisphere for PowerMax makes reconfiguring the array even easier by reducing the number of steps that are required to delete and repurpose volumes.

PowerMax systems deliver deep integration with all the VMware vSphere core storage- enablement primitives. VAAI, the core VMware API for storage offload, significantly increases the performance of the vSphere cluster. PowerMax systems support all VAAI primitives—XCOPY, UNMAP, WRITE SAME, and ATS Lock Extents, and they also support VVols and VASA 2.0 for next-generation VMware environments.

To enable orchestrated disaster recovery failover, PowerMax systems integrate with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and VMware Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) with Dell EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) software. For heterogeneous target replication in virtualized environments and for VM-specific replication, PowerMax systems integrate with Dell EMC RecoverPoint and RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, respectively.

PowerMax systems provide additional integration points, beyond the core VMware integration points, to ensure a complete integrated user experience that is familiar to the VMware administrator. Dell EMC VSI plugs into VMware vSphere Web Client, enabling administrators to directly provision PowerMax storage, visualize the infrastructure, manage local replication, schedule UNMAP operations, and much more. The Dell EMC Storage Analytics (ESA) plug-in provides integration with VMware vRealize Operations Manager to provide a complete end-to-end, in-context view of systems and storage health. Further, the Dell EMC VMAX and PowerMax Content Pack for vRealize Log Insight provides dashboards, alerts, and queries to sort and intelligently present PowerMax log information directly from vCenter. All PowerMax integrations for VMware environments are available at no additional cost.

Management

This design uses an OOB management cluster and a platform management cluster.

OOB management cluster

Having a cluster of hosts, rather than a single host, ensures that management components have dedicated resources that the production environment does not use. Having a separate management cluster also provides for independent scaling of compute resources between management and production workloads. By separating management into its own cluster, it can be easier to determine the management components and their related infrastructure. The separation of clusters also reduces the chance of human error during routine operations in any cluster.

The management cluster is configured to support a single host failure, commonly referred to as N+1. Adding management components beyond those specified might require additional hosts.

Platform management cluster

The platform management cluster contains the IaaS components that are described in Infrastructure as a Service. These components provide the automation and content catalog resources that are needed to support an IaaS environment. This cluster, like the OOB management cluster, is separate from the production clusters to ensure the performance of the management and production clusters.

Separating the OOB management and platform management clusters from one another also achieves a greater level of resiliency. The platform management cluster resides on blades in the PowerEdge MX7000 chassis. When designing larger environments that use multiple MX7000 chassis, disaggregate the platform management cluster and spread it across multiple chassis and racks, as shown in the following figure. This disaggregation improves the fault tolerance of the cluster by removing potential points of failure. You can apply this method to other clusters as well to improve their resiliency.

Figure 5.         Platform management on multiple MX7000 chassis

Infrastructure as a Service

VMware IaaS provides virtualized computing resources by separating applications and their resource demands from the underlying infrastructure resources on which they rely. VMware Validated Design (VVD) for Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) extends the typical IaaS solution to include operations management, business continuity, and security.

The combination of compute, storage, and networking hardware in this Ready Stack provides an ideal platform on which to configure IaaS. For more information, see Validated Designs on the VMware website.

Enterprise Storage Analytics

Dell EMC Enterprise Storage Analytics (ESA) for vRealize Operations enables customers to optimize performance and diagnose issues across their physical storage and VMs. Dell EMC ESA for vRealize Operations:

• Collects analytical data from Dell EMC resources and provides actionable performance analysis
• Proactively delivers a single, end-to-end view of virtualized infrastructures, from servers to storage
• Provides increased visibility, metrics, and a rich collection of storage analytics

vRealize Automation

In an IaaS solution, vRealize Automation enables rapid modeling and provisioning of servers and desktops across virtual and physical resources, in private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructures.

vRealize Log Insight

vRealize Log Insight delivers automated log management, through log analytics, aggregation, and search, that provides operational intelligence and visibility for enabling service levels and to increase operational efficiency.

VMAX and PowerMax Content Pack

The Dell EMC VMAX and PowerMax Content Pack, when integrated with VMware vRealize Log Insight, provides dashboards and user-defined fields for VMAX and PowerMax storage, enabling administrators to conduct problem analysis and analytics on their arrays.