Dell Technologies vSAN ESA AF-0 makes vSAN easier for small and medium businesses
Tue, 14 Nov 2023 21:26:35 -0000
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Dell Technologies and VMware have created a viable solution with low hardware entry requirements with the new VMware ESA profile, AF-0, to help customers ride the competitive edge, with lower total cost of ownership.
VMware has added the new ESA AF-0 to the ReadyNode profile with minimum hardware requirements for host CPU, memory, and networking, and with the full performance benefits of a single storage tier comprised of NVMe devices. With the vSAN ESA AF-0 profile, VMware and Dell Technologies offer customers simplified IT environments, plus the latest 16G server technology, performance, low failure, and maintenance domains, with a competitive advantage that flexibly aligns with business objectives.
At Dell Technologies, we understand this. And with VMware, our focus is to help you achieve your goals easily and on your terms. Dell Technologies ReadyNodes built on PowerEdge servers are tested and validated building blocks for the vSAN ESA solution.
The new ReadyNodes profile, AF-0, helps customers in a wide deployment use case, but not limited to:
- Customer environments that need to run small or modest workloads (leveraging existing data centers networking (10Gbps switches)), to dramatically reduce TCO and benefit from ESA features and capabilities.
- 2-node environments running just the required number of VMs for small data centers and edge environments. For example: a small or medium business that needs lower hardware entry requirements than in a similar OSA configuration.
Dell vSAN Express Storage Architecture ReadyNode AF-0 configuration
Table 1. An example of a Dell vSAN ESA ReadyNode AF-0 configuration
Components | Description | Quantity |
ESXi Pre-Installed | Yes |
|
System | vSAN Express Storage Architecture AF-0 | 2 |
CPU | Intel Xeon Gold 6434 3.7G, 8C/16T, 16GT/s, 23M Cache, Turbo, HT (195W) DDR5-4800 | 2 |
Memory | 16GB RDIMM, 4800MT/s Single Rank, 4800MT/s RDIMMs | 8 |
Storage Tier | 1.6TB Enterprise NVMe Mixed Use AG Drive U.2 Gen4 with carrier | 2 |
NIC | Broadcom 57414 Dual Port 10/25GbE SFP28, OCP NIC 3.0 | 1 |
Boot Device | BOSS-N1 controller card + with 2 M.2 480GB (RAID 1) | 1 |
Five enhancements for VMware vSAN ESA 8 Update 2
VMware vSAN ESA introduces several new enhancements. These deliver better performance and make improved data durability and resilience available across all ESA profiles, from AF-0 to AF-High Density for small and medium businesses to large enterprises.
Figure 1. VMware vSAN ESA ReadyNode profiles
The five enhancements are:
- ESA brings Integrated file services to Cloud Native and Traditional workloads, when running vSAN file services, and supports NFS and SMB protocols for traditional and cloud native clients. Some additional enhancements include an improved Active Directory configuration check, improved network reconfigurations, and faster failover of protocol services containers in maintenance mode.
- ESA's Adaptive Write (writes data in an alternative, optimized way) Path helps ESA ingest and process data more quickly, to provide improved performance, higher throughput, and lower latency on write intensive workloads.
- Adaptive Write Path helps in disaggregated topologies, where VMs in a vSphere or vSAN cluster that are consuming the storage resources of another vSAN ESA or vSAN cluster can take advantage of this capability. This enhancement helps achieve higher throughput and lower latency, automatically in real-time without administrator intervention.
- ESA also provides optimized I/O processing in the upper layers in the vSAN ESA stack that occurs between the VM and its objects, drastically increasing performance. This improved parallelism is particularly important for resource intensive VMs that require higher IOPS and throughput, leveraging the latest and faster underlying ReadyNode hardware specifications.
- Lastly, with reduced efforts required to process I/O, ESA can now support more VMs per host: from 200 VMs to 500 VMs per host. This increase in VM density allows customers (especially small and medium business customers) to take advantage of the latest hardware from the PowerEdge portfolio, by running more VMs with fewer hosts, such as with the vSAN ESA AF-0 profile.
These enhancements to vSAN ESA, and the introduction of the AF-0 ReadyNode profile to the Dell PowerEdge server portfolio, provide a winning combination for small and medium businesses, small datacenters, and edge environments.
Dell PowerEdge Next Server Portfolio
Dell PowerEdge servers are built to support an organization’s quest to adopt and acquire the latest technologies for their IT requirements. Although providing these technological enhancements is imperative, it is important to note that business needs vary, and the latest technologies must flexibly align these enhancements across small and medium business to large organizations.
Figure 2. Dell vSAN ReadyNodes portfolio for the AF-0 profile
Dell PowerEdge servers are designed for the modern evolving data center, providing the productivity and performance for diverse workloads. Available in different form factors, they are engineered to run the most demanding applications across industry segments to address the challenges of digital transformation. The portfolio of PowerEdge servers configured for VMware vSAN Ready Nodes, is jointly engineered, validated, and certified, and one of the broadest in the industry. When you build a vSAN Cluster, Dell Technologies and VMware strongly recommend using tested and certified ReadyNodes that are validated to provide predictable performance and scalability.
With combined solutions featuring Dell PowerEdge servers, and VMware vSAN 8, customers get improved performance, reduced risks, a certified platform, and can scale as needed to accelerate their journey with a competitive edge towards digital transformation.
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Author: Thomas MM