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This section provides an overview of the Ready Stack management infrastructure and the software components that run on VMs within the management cluster.
The management infrastructure consists of a minimum of three PowerEdge R640 servers that form a management cluster. Management components are virtualized to provide high availability. Redundant 10/25 GbE uplinks to the network infrastructure, redundant 16 Gb/s FC uplinks to the storage array, and vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA) ensure that management components stay online. The Dell EMC PowerSwitch S4148T is used for OOB connectivity, and iDRAC ports in each management and compute cluster connect to the switch. The iDRAC ports on the management server connect to the S4148T-ON switch; the iDRAC ports on the blade server connect through the MX9116n to the S4148T-ON switch.
OpenManage Enterprise Modular Edition runs on the MX9002m modules, which uplink to the S4148T-ON switches through the Management Services Module (MSM) Ethernet interface.
The management software components include:
The following figure illustrates the management infrastructure:
Figure 13. Management infrastructure
For the production (compute) cluster that contains the IaaS management tools, the PowerEdge MX7000 infrastructure includes comprehensive embedded systems management, OpenManage Enterprise Modular Edition, that runs on up to two redundant MX9002m management modules per chassis. OpenManage Enterprise provides a single management point for compute, storage, and networking, which enables intelligent automation through an operational template methodology and a comprehensive RESTful API. For more details, see Infrastructure as a service.
BCF integration with vSphere, vCenter, and vRealize Log Insight provides network automation and visibility. Network administrators gain visibility into the virtualization environment through the BCF Controller and can use the BCF plug-in for vSphere Web Client to provide fabric visibility to the VMware administrator.
When integrated with vCenter, BCF provides:
After you install the BCF plug-in, BCF appears as a menu item in the vSphere web client, as shown in the following figure:
Figure 14. BCF plug-in in the vSphere Web Client
The management software components for the Ready Stack require a nominal amount of virtual server resources. The components could reside on the compute server cluster, alongside the compute workload. However, Dell EMC recommends that you run them on a dedicated management server cluster to achieve less resource contention while providing security isolation.
vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 is a preconfigured Linux VM that is optimized for running vCenter Server and its associated services. The appliance package contains the following software:
vCenter Server provides management of virtualized hosts and VMs from a single console. It gives administrators visibility into the configuration of the critical components of a virtual infrastructure. Key capabilities that are enabled by vCenter Server include vSphere vMotion, vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler, vSphere HA, and vSphere Fault Tolerance. The open plug-in architecture of vCenter Server supports a broad range of additional capabilities from VMware and its partners, including the BCF plug-in for vSphere Web Client from Big Switch Networks. The vCenter Server APIs also allow integration of physical and virtual management tools for maximum flexibility.
OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter streamlines the management processes in the data center environment by enabling the use of vCenter to manage the entire server infrastructure—both physical and virtual. OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter expands data center management with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers in multiple ways including:
OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter provides deep-level details for inventory, monitoring, and alerting of Dell EMC hosts within vCenter and, based on Dell EMC hardware events, recommends or performs vCenter actions.
Proactive HA is a feature of vSphere HA that works with OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter. When enabled, Proactive HA safeguards workloads by proactively taking measures based on degradation of redundancy health in a host’s supported components. When OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter detects a change in the redundancy health status of supported components, through either traps or polling, the health update notification for the component is sent to the vCenter server. Polling runs every hour and is available as a fail-safe mechanism to cover the possibility of a trap loss. After assessing the redundancy health status of the supported host components, the OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter appliance updates the vCenter server with the health status change.
Deployment templates contain a system profile, hardware profile, hypervisor profile, a combination of system profile and hypervisor profile, or a combination of the hardware profile and hypervisor profile. The OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter deployment wizard uses the template to provision server hardware and deploy hosts within vCenter. Dell EMC recommends using the system profile type for PowerEdge servers. For Internal Dual SD Module (IDSDM) deployment, enable the IDSDM from the BIOS before you deploy a hypervisor with OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter.
The management software components run on VMs that reside in the management cluster. The following table lists the management components in the bundle and the recommended VM sizing of the components:
Table 13. Management component sizing
Component |
Number of VMs |
Number of CPU cores |
RAM (GB) |
Disk space (GB) |
Number of NICs |
VMware vCenter Server Appliance (small environment1) |
1 |
4 |
16 |
340 |
1 |
Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter |
1 |
2 |
8 |
44 |
1 |
Dell EMC VSI |
1 |
2 |
8 |
11 |
1 |
Big Switch BCF Controller2 |
2 |
12 |
46 |
400 |
4 (vNICs) |
1 The small environment has up to 100 hosts or 1,000 VMs
2 The BCF Controller consists of one active and one passive VM.