Figure 2.        PowerFlex rack two-layer architecture

In this solution, each PowerFlex storage-only node includes two Intel Xeon Skylake 8-core processors, 192 GB RAM, and six 3.84 TB SSDs. From the PowerFlex standpoint, the embedded OS storage-only nodes run the SDS component of PowerFlex to provide storage capacity. A single protection domain is created from these four SDS systems. A single storage pool is created within this protection domain from which persistent storage volumes can be provisioned for Kinetica VM’s. Four PowerFlex compute-only nodes (ESXi 6.7) run the SDC components of the PowerFlex to access the volumes created in the storage pool.

The Kinetica cluster is deployed as virtual machines on a VMware vSphere cluster. For Kinetica to work, the minimum hardware requirement to run Kinetica node components is two CPUs with at least eight cores Intel x86-64, 8 GB of memory and one GPU (where a GPU version of the Kinetica DB is being installed). 

Considering CPU, GPU, and memory, it is recommended to spread different roles of the Kinetica cluster (etcd, head, and workers) across different nodes so that they can scale independently from one another. In this solution, each virtual machine is configured with two virtual CPUs, 512 GB RAM, 2x A100 GPU and thick provisioned disks on the PowerFlex backend storage. In this solution, each of these virtual machines are installed with Ubuntu operating system.

The following figure shows the logical architecture of Kinetica on HCI PowerFlex rack cluster setup:

Figure 3.     PowerFlex rack HCI Architecture