Home > Storage > PowerStore > Storage Admin > Design Guide—VMware vSphere with PowerStore Storage > Storage design
This Ready Stack design consists of two PowerStore T appliances, each with two nodes in an all-NVMe base enclosure, in a two-appliance (four-node) cluster. The PowerStore unified storage appliances, which include dual-socket Intel Skylake architecture and the PowerStoreOS, support:
The active/active architecture provides:
This Ready Stack design includes a connection to a 16 Gb FC storage network. The PowerStore T is designed for all-flash storage. With all-inclusive software, PowerStore T systems deliver consistent performance with low response times and are ideal for mixed virtual-workload requirements. Two Dell EMC Connectrix DS-6620B switches make up the FC fabrics.
The following table shows a comparison of the PowerStore storage arrays that this Ready Stack solution supports:
Table 3. PowerStore T storage arrays
|
PowerStore 1000T |
PowerStore 3000T |
PowerStore 5000T |
PowerStore 7000T |
PowerStore 9000T |
CPU per appliance |
4 x 8C @ 1.8 GHz Skylake |
4 x 12C @ 2.1 GHz Skylake |
4 x 16C @ 2.1 GHz Skylake |
4 x 20C @ 2.4 GHz Skylake |
4 x 28C @ 2.1 GHz Skylake |
Memory per appliance |
384 GB |
768 GB |
1,152 GB |
1,536 GB |
2,560 GB |
NVRAM drives per appliance |
2 |
4 |
|||
Maximum storage drives per appliance |
98 |
96 |
|||
Supported drives |
NVMe SCM, NVMe Flash, SAS SSD |
||||
Embedded ports |
4 x 25/10/1 GbE Optical or 4 x 10/1 GbE BaseT |
||||
Support I/O modules (two slots per node) |
4 x 32/16/8 Gb FC, 4 x 25/10/1 GbE Optical, 4 x 10/1 GbE BaseT |
||||
Supported expansion shelves |
2.5-in., 25-drive SAS SSD |
For more information, see the Dell EMC PowerStore Storage Family Spec Sheet.
Between the front and back of the enclosure, a midplane distributes power and signals to all the enclosure components.
On the front of the base enclosure, drives connect to the midplane. On the back of the base enclosure, the nodes and power supply modules connect to the midplane. The I/O modules connect directly to the node. Each node contains an internal battery backup module, redundant fan modules, DDR4 memory, and two Intel Skylake processors.
The following figure shows the front of the base enclosure:
Location |
Description |
SSD or SCM NVMe drives |
|
NVRAM NVMe drives Note: With systems that use two NVRAM NVMe drives, the first two of these slots can be populated with SSD or SCM NVMe drives. |
|
Base enclosure power-on LED |
|
Drive ready/activity LED |
|
Drive fault LED |
Figure 11. Base enclosure front view
On the back of the base enclosure are two nodes: node A and node B. Each node contains the following hardware components:
The following figure shows the back of the base enclosure:
Location |
Description |
Node B |
|
Node A |
|
Power supply module |
|
I/O module, slots 0 and 1 |
|
Embedded module |
Figure 12. Base enclosure back view
Each node contains one embedded module that can hold one 4-port card for front-end connectivity and internal communication between nodes and appliances.
The first two ports of the 4-port card on the embedded module connect to a 10 GbE/25 GbE switch.
The embedded module contains the following components:
The 4-port card is an optional component within the embedded module. The supported 4‑port cards are:
PowerStore-T systems support the following base enclosure I/O modules:
Included within each node are the following components:
The drive expansion enclosure is 2U (3.5 inches high) and includes slots for twenty-five 2.5-inch drives. It uses a 12 Gbps SAS interface for communication between the nodes and the expansion enclosure.
The front of the expansion enclosure includes the following components:
The following figure shows the front of the expansion enclosure:
Location |
Description |
2.5-in. 12 Gbps SAS drives |
|
Expansion enclosure fault LED (amber) |
|
Expansion enclosure power status LED (blue) |
|
Drive fault LED (amber) |
|
Drive status/activity (blue) |
Figure 13. 2U, 25-drive expansion enclosure front view
The following components are on the back of a 2U, 25-drive expansion enclosure, as shown in Error! Reference source not found.:
Figure 14. 2U, 25-drive expansion enclosure back view
The PowerStore T base enclosure box contains the following components:
The optional PowerStore T expansion enclosure box contains the following components:
PowerStore T provides two storage configuration options during the initial system configuration:
Changing the storage configuration requires a factory reset.
The PowerStore network is a subset of IP addresses in a single subnet within an L2 broadcast domain. This network consists of an IP address range, network prefix, gateway, and a VLAN.
PowerStore T requires the following distinct networks:
The PowerStore T networks are grouped into the following physical networks:
Figure 15 shows the minimum required cabling for these networks.
PowerStore T models contain a system bond by default. This bond is essential to the networking configuration and cannot be removed. The system bond provides high availability to cluster data and metadata traffic. In this bond, ports 0 and 1 of a 4-port card are automatically bonded together in LACP mode.
To provide high availability, this design requires the following dual Ethernet switches, each running OS10 Enterprise Edition (OS10EE):
PowerStore T deployments require OOB management switch connectivity with at least one OOB management switch. A second OOB management switch is optional and can be used for high availability. An OOB management switch can be configured with or without a management VLAN.
Switch ports must support untagged native VLAN traffic for system discovery.
This design includes a single OOB management switch. Two ToR switches provide high availability. Layer 2 connectivity is configured between ToR switches.
The following figure shows the network cabling:
Figure 15. Network cabling
Connect the base enclosure to the switches as follows:
The following figure shows the FC connections for a typical setup of redundant A/B SANs.
Figure 16. FC SAN connections
Connect the 32 Gb FC ports in the optional FC I/O modules to the Connectrix DS-6620B SAN switches, as follows:
When connecting the expansion enclosure to the base enclosure, connect both embedded modules on the base enclosure to the link control card (LCC) on the expansion enclosure, as shown in Figure 17:
Figure 17. Connecting the expansion enclosure to the base enclosure