Home > Storage > PowerStore > Storage Admin > Design Guide—VMware vSphere with PowerStore Storage > Management design
The management infrastructure consists of two PowerEdge R640 servers that form a management cluster.
Note: Optionally, a third management server in the cluster can help ensure high availability in the event of a server failure.
Management components are virtualized to provide high availability. Redundant 10/25 GbE uplinks to the network infrastructure and redundant 16 Gbps FC uplinks to the storage array combined with vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA) ensure that management components stay online. A PowerSwitch S4148F-ON switch provides OOB connectivity, and iDRAC ports in each management and compute cluster connect to the S4148F-ON switch.
The management software components include:
The following figure shows the management infrastructure:
Figure 18. Management infrastructure
The management software components for this Ready Stack solution require a nominal amount of virtual server resources. Although the management software could reside on the compute server cluster, alongside the compute workload, you might choose to run these software components on dedicated physical server resources. Running the management software on dedicated physical servers provides for security and workload isolation and for less resource contention with the compute workloads. Our design shows a minimal configuration with only two management servers; however, for a vSphere HA cluster, we recommend a minimum of three management servers.
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. vCenter Server enables key vSphere features such as vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, HA, and Fault Tolerance. The open plug-in architecture of vCenter Server supports a broad range of additional capabilities from VMware and its partners. The vCenter Server APIs also allow integration of physical and virtual management tools for maximum flexibility.
Dell EMC VSI for vSphere Web Client is a vCenter plug-in. It enables administrators to view, manage, and optimize storage for VMware ESXi hosts, and then map that storage to the hosts. VSI consists of a UI and the Dell EMC Solutions Integration Service (SIS), which provides communication and access to the storage systems.
Using the SIS, a storage administrator can enable VM administrators to perform management tasks on a set of storage pools. For the PowerStore T platforms, these tasks include datastore provisioning, compression management, space reclamation, and multipathing policy management.
When you install VSI, it automatically registers Dell EMC PowerPath/VE SAN multipathing software and enables you to set multipathing policies for all devices by using the VMware Native Multipathing Plug-In (NMP) or PowerPath/VE software. After installing VSI, you can provision VMFS-6 datastores in vCenter Inventory Lists in data centers, folders, clusters, and hosts. Also, using the space reclamation feature in VSI, you can reclaim unused storage on datastores, hosts, clusters, folders, and storage folders. Space reclamation tasks are created per datastore. Scheduling from the host, cluster, folder, or storage folder level results in one scheduled task per datastore under the target object. Only one scheduled reclamation task can exist for each datastore.
Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter is designed to streamline the management processes in your data center environment by allowing you to use vCenter to manage your entire server infrastructure—both physical and virtual. For example, with Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter, you can use vCenter to:
Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter provides deep-level details for inventory, monitoring, and alerting of Dell EMC hosts within vCenter. It recommends or performs vCenter actions, based on Dell EMC hardware events.
Proactive HA is a vCenter feature that works with Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter. When enabled, Proactive HA safeguards your workloads by acting in response to degradation of redundancy health of supported components in a host. When Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter detects a change in the redundancy health status of supported components (either through traps or polling), the health update notification for the component is sent to the vCenter server. Polling runs every hour, and it 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 Dell EMC 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 Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter Configuration Wizard uses the deployment template to provision server hardware and deploy hosts within vCenter. We recommend that you use the latest system profile type for Dell EMC rack servers. For internal dual SD module deployment, enable the IDSDM from the BIOS before you deploy a hypervisor with Dell EMC 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 those components:
Table 4. Management component sizing
Component |
VMs |
CPU cores |
RAM (GB) |
Disk (GB) |
NICs |
VMware vCenter Server Appliance |
1 |
8 |
24 |
525 |
1 |
Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter |
1 |
4 |
16 |
95 |
1 |