The physical architecture of this solution offers an infrastructure foundation that affords flexibility, scalability, redundancy, workload isolation, security, and high availability.
This Ready Stack solution provides the following design characteristics:
- Both vSphere management and compute cluster hosts use local storage to boot the operating system.
- The Unity XT system provides high-performance block storage to both vSphere management and compute cluster hosts through the FC SAN fabric. LUN-backed VMFS datastores host the VMDKs.
- The Isilon system provides high-performance NAS storage to both vSphere management and compute cluster hosts through NFS over the Ethernet fabric. NFS-backed shares provide file share repository services.
- Security and isolation are achieved by physical and logical separation of:
- Enterprise infrastructure services such as Active Directory, NTP, and DHCP are hosted as VMs on the management cluster, though they may be present externally.
- A single vCenter instance is used for both management and compute cluster resources.
- The PowerSwitch S5232F-ON terminates L2 and connects to the customer network through redundant uplinks to either a spine switch or router by way of Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) or Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) with equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) routing.
We imaged all hosts with the Dell EMC customized VMware ESXi 6.7 U3 A04 image, which contains Dell specific driver VIBs already packaged and configured. This customized imaging reduces the amount of manual work involved in standardizing images by ensuring that the latest supported drivers and features are installed.
You can download the customized ESXi image from Dell Support at Dell EMC customized VMware ESXi 6.7 U3 A04 image.
