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The management of this Ready Stack design centers around a new or existing VMware vSphere environment. Additional plug-ins such as Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter (OMIVV) and iDRAC provide ease of management for the physical PowerEdge servers.
For information about bare-metal and virtualized infrastructure options in this Ready Stack, see Bare-metal versus virtualized infrastructure.
vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 is a preconfigured Linux VM that is optimized for running vCenter Server and its associated services. This Ready Stack design assumes that the two VM-hosted database servers will be deployed in your existing virtualization management infrastructure.
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 DRS, vSphere HA, and vSphere 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.
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 in 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. If you are using a vSphere virtualization infrastructure that has multiple hosts (see Bare-metal versus virtualized infrastructure), the Proactive HA feature 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, it sends a health update notification for the component 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.
In this Ready Stack, the management software components run on the two VMs that are hosting the OLTP databases. 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 |