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The management of this Ready Stack design centers around VMware Cloud Foundation management tools such as SDDC Manager and vCenter. Additional plug-ins such as Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter (OMIVV) and iDRAC provide ease of management for the physical PowerEdge servers. Dell EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) provides ease of management for the Unity storage.
The following figure illustrates the management infrastructure.
Figure 10. Management infrastructure
The management system consists of at least three PowerEdge R640 servers that are configured as the management domain within VMware Cloud Foundation. The management domain then deploys the VMs and provides ongoing life-cycle management through the SDDC Manager.
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 capabilities such as vSphere vMotion, vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere High Availability (HA), and vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT). 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 enable integration of physical and virtual management tools for maximum flexibility.
VSI for VMware vSphere Web Client is a plug-in for VMware vCenter. It enables administrators to view, manage, and optimize storage for vSphere servers and 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. Tasks that you can perform with VSI include provisioning datastores, reclaiming space, and setting multipathing policies.
During installation, VSI automatically registers Dell EMC PowerPath/VE software, enabling you to set multipathing policies for all devices by using the VMware Native Multipathing Plug-in (NMP) or PowerPath/VE software. After VIS is installed, you can provision VMFS6 datastores in vCenter inventory lists in data centers, folders, clusters, and hosts. Additionally, 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.
OMIVV streamlines the management processes in the data center environment by enabling the use of vCenter to manage the entire server infrastructure—both physical and virtual. OMIVV expands data center management with PowerEdge servers through many ways, including:
OMIVV provides deep-level details for inventory, monitoring, and alerting of Dell EMC hosts within vCenter, and it recommends or performs vCenter actions based on Dell EMC hardware events.
Proactive HA is a feature of vSphere HA that works with OMIVV. Proactive HA safeguards workloads by proactively taking measures based on degradation of redundancy health of supported components in a host. When OMIVV detects a change in the redundancy health status of supported components, through either 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 OMIVV 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 OMIVV deployment wizard uses the template to provision server hardware and deploy hosts within vCenter. Dell EMC recommends using the system profile type for the servers that are described in this Ready Stack certified reference system. For Dell EMC Internal Dual SDM Module (IDSDM) deployment, enable the IDSDM from the BIOS before you deploy a hypervisor with OMIVV.
The management software components run on VMs that reside in the management cluster. The following table shows the recommended VM sizing of the management components.
Table 7. Recommended VM sizing of management components
Component |
Number of VMs |
Number of CPU cores |
RAM (GB) |
Disk space (GB) |
Number of NICs |
vCenter Server Appliance |
1 |
4 |
16 |
290 |
1 |
OMIVV |
1 |
2 |
8 |
44 |
1 |
VSI |
1 |
2 |
8 |
11 |
1 |