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Extending Dell Technologies Cloud Platform Availability for Mission Critical Applications
Executive summary Introduction
Solution overview
External storage with Cloud Foundation on VxRail
Use cases
PowerMax family
SRDF/Metro
Solution architecture Configuration Testing methodology Conclusion References

Use cases

Use cases

  • External storage and Cloud Foundation have two important use cases: principal storage and supplemental storage.

    • Principal storage—SDDC Manager provisions a workload domain that uses vSAN, NFS, or Fibre Channel (FC) storage for a workload domain cluster’s principal storage (the initial shared storage that is used to create a cluster.

    By default, VCF uses vSAN storage as the principal storage for a cluster. The option to use NFS and FC-connected external storage is also available. This option enables administrators to create a workload domain cluster whose principal storage can be an NFS datastore or an FC-based VMFS datastore instead of vSAN. SDDC Manager provisions a workload domain (WLD) cluster by attaching a previously created NFS file system or FC LUN to it instead of using and configuring a vSAN storage for that cluster. In both cases, the administrator manually creates the external storage ahead of time. The network (IP or FC) must also be configured or zoned ahead of time so that the nodes that will be used for the workload cluster have access to the network. The mounting and formatting of the storage is automated as part of the SDDC Manager ‘create WLD’ cluster workflow. Importantly, Cloud Foundation does not provide extensible LCM capabilities for the external storage systems. That is still a separately managed process.

    • Supplemental storage—This involves manually mounting previously provisioned external NFS, iSCSI, vVols, or FC storage to a Cloud Foundation workload domain cluster that is using vSAN as the principal storage. Supporting external storage for these workload domain clusters is comparable to the experience of administrators using standard vSphere clusters who want to attach secondary datastores to those clusters. For Cloud Foundation, this mounting process is performed manually using standard vCenter operations procedures. Cloud Foundation does not take ownership of the life cycle management, storage provisioning, or network (IP or FC) configuration or zoning for the external storage systems. Instead, administrators use the native storage system and network management tools for those tasks.

    At the time of writing, Cloud Foundation on VxRail supports supplemental storage use cases only.