Anywhere, that’s a powerful statement, especially to someone who works in IT. That could be in a cloud, or in a set of virtual machines in your data center, or even physical hosts. What if you could run Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere on a virtual machine or on bare-metal, anywhere, including your data center?

You might have read my previous blog where we discussed running Amazon EKS Anywhere on Dell PowerFlex in a virtual environment. This time we are going further and have validated Amazon EKS Anywhere on a bare-metal instance of PowerFlex. 

The good old days

If you are old enough to remember, like I am, the days before virtualization, with stranded resources and data centers with enormous footprints to support all the discrete servers and siloed workloads, you might be curious: Why would anyone go back to bare-metal?

Having been part of the movement all the way back to 2006, it’s a good question. In simple terms, what we are seeing today is not a return to the bare-metal siloed data centers of 20 years ago. Instead, we are seeing an improved utilization of resources by leveraging micro services, be that in the cloud, in virtualized environments, or with bare-metal. In addition, it provides greater portability and scalability than could ever have been imagined 20 years ago. This is thanks to the use of containers and the way they isolate processes from each other. Additionally, with a bare-metal platform running containers, more system resources can be directed to workloads than if the containers were nested inside of a virtual environment.  

This is central to the concept of a DevOps-ready platform. In the coming weeks, we will expand on how this enhances the productivity of native cloud operations for today’s modern businesses. You will find this on the Dell Digital blog with the title Customer Choice Comes First: Dell Technologies and AWS EKS Anywhere.

Beyond just the economics of this, there are scenarios where a bare-metal deployment can be helpful. This includes low latency and latency sensitive applications that need to run near the data origin. This of course can include edge scenarios where it is not practical to transmit vast quantities of data.

Data sovereignty and compliance can also be addressed as an Amazon EKS Anywhere solution. While data and associated processing can be done in the data center, to maintain compliance requirements, it can still be part of a holistic environment that is displayed in the Amazon EKS Console when the Amazon EKS Connector has been configured. This allows for monitoring of applications running anywhere in the environment. 

Digging deeper

Digging deeper on this concept, PowerFlex is a software defined infrastructure (SDI) that provides a powerful tool in delivering the modern bare-metal or virtualized options that best suit application deployment needs. The hardware infrastructure becomes malleable to the needs of the data center and can take on various forms of modern infrastructure, from hyper-converged to bare-metal. This has always been a core tenet of PowerFlex. 

When Amazon EKS Anywhere is deployed on PowerFlex, it becomes possible to optimize the IT environment precisely for the needs of the environment, instead of forcing it to conform to the limits of IT infrastructure. Bare-metal hosts can provide microservices for large applications, such as databases and websites, where a container instance may be created and destroyed rapidly and on a massive scale. 

The architecture

Let’s look at the Amazon EKS Anywhere validated architecture in the following figure. It shows how PowerFlex delivers a unique software-defined 3-tier architecture that can asymmetrically scale compute separate from storage.

The bottom portion of the figure consists of PowerFlex – storage-only nodes (1U). In the middle of the diagram are the hosts used for the control plane and worker nodes. These are PowerFlex – compute-only nodes (2U). On the far left are the admin and Tinkerbell nodes that allow for administration of the environment. Lastly, in the top set of boxes, we have the control plane, at the top left, that provides operational control and orchestration. The worker nodes, at the top right, handle the workloads.  

Let’s look at some important aspects of each area shown here, starting with the storage nodes. Each storage node contains five 1.4TB SAS SSD drives and eight 25GbE network links. For the validation, as shown here, four PowerFlex storage nodes were used to provide full redundancy.

For the compute nodes, we used two 2U nodes. These two hosts have the PowerFlex Container Storage Interface (CSI) Plug-in installed to provide access to the PowerFlex storage. This is deployed as part of the PXE boot process along with the Ubuntu OS. It’s important to note that there is no hypervisor installed and that the storage is provided by the four storage nodes. This creates a two-layer architecture which, as you can see, creates separate storage and compute layers for the environment. 

Using a two-layer architecture makes it possible to scale resources independently as needed in the environment, which allows for optimal resource utilization. Thus, if more storage is needed, it can be scaled without increasing the amount of compute. And likewise, if the environment needs additional compute capacity, it can easily be added. 

Cluster Creation

Outside of the Amazon EKS Anywhere instance are two nodes. Both are central to building the control plane and worker nodes. The admin node is where the user can control the Amazon EKS Anywhere instance and serves as a portal to upload inventory information to the Tinkerbell node. The Tinkerbell node serves as the infrastructure services stack and is key in the provisioning and PXE booting of the bare-metal workloads.

When a configuration file with the data center hardware has been uploaded, Tinkerbell generates a cluster configuration file. The hardware configuration and cluster configuration files, both in YAML format, are processed by Tinkerbell to create a boot strap kind cluster on the admin host to install the Cluster-API (CAPI) and the Cluster-API-Provider-Tinkerbell (CAPT). 

With the base control environment operational, CAPI creates cluster node resources, and CAPT maps and powers on the corresponding bare-mental servers. The bare-metal servers PXE boot from the Tinkerbell node. The bare-metal servers then join the Kubernetes cluster. Cluster management resources are transferred from the bootstrap cluster to the target Amazon EKS Anywhere workload cluster. The local bootstrap kind cluster is then deleted from the admin machine. This creates both the Control Plane and Worker Nodes. With the cluster established, SDC drivers are installed on the Worker node(s) along with the Dell CSI Plug-in for PowerFlex. At this point, workloads can be deployed to the Worker node(s) as needed. 

Cluster Provisioning

With the infrastructure deployed, our solutions engineers were able to test the Amazon EKS Anywhere environment. The testing included provisioning persistent volume claims (PVCs), expanding PVCs, and snapshotting them. All of this functionality relies on the Dell CSI Plugin for PowerFlex. Following this validation, a test workload can be deployed on the bare-metal Amazon EKS Anywhere environment. 

If you would like to explore the deployment further, the Dell Solutions Engineering team is creating a white paper on the deployment of Amazon EKS Anywhere that covers these details in greater depth. When published, we will be sure to update this blog with a link to the white paper. 

Anywhere 

This validation enables the use of Amazon EKS Anywhere across bare-metal environments, expanding the use beyond the previous validation of virtual environments. This means that you can use Amazon EKS Anywhere anywhere, really!

With bare-metal deployments, it is possible to scale environments independently based on resource demands. PowerFlex software defined infrastructure not only supports a malleable environment like this, but also allows mixing environments to include hyper converged components. This means that an infrastructure can be tailored to the environment’s needs — instead of the environment being forced to conform to the infrastructure. It also creates an environment that unifies the competing demands of data sovereignty and cloud IT, by enabling data to maintain appropriate residence while unifying the control plane. 

If you’re interested in finding out more about how you can leverage Amazon EKS Anywhere in your bare-metal PowerFlex environment, reach out to your Dell representative. Where is anywhere for you?

Resources

• Deploying a test workload
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere on Dell PowerFlex
• Introducing bare metal deployments for Amazon EKS Anywhere
• Blog: Customer Choice Comes First: Dell Technologies and AWS EKS Anywhere

Authors: Tony Foster

Twitter: @wonder_nerd
LinkedIn

Syed Abrar   LinkedIn

Application Modernization

Modernizing applications, barring monoliths that are tightly coupled with the underlying infrastructure, means consolidating, repurposing, or refactoring legacy software and applications. It also means modernizing the platform infrastructure to create new business value from existing applications and to ensure that it aligns closely with current business needs. Legacy modernization leverages, rather than upgrading, retiring an existing system, or replacing it wholesale, extending the lifespan of an organization’s applications and taking advantage of technical innovations.

Planning to modernize legacy or even modern applications from a physical to a virtual environment is very important. There are many options available for application modernization or legacy modernization.

The one discussed in this blog is about migrating an entire database to a new environment with a container orchestrator such as VMware Tanzu. In this study, migrating a MySQL workload from an older PowerEdge MX740c environment to a newer PowerEdge MX750c consolidates the hardware platform and reaps the benefits of VMware Tanzu containers.

To help organizations understand the value of refreshing their older Dell PowerEdge hardware to newer 15G compute sleds with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) containerization, we conducted a series of tests:

• First, we measured the OLTP performance of MySQL virtual machines from a legacy PowerEdge MX740c compute sled running VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 3.
• Next, we recorded the amount of time necessary to migrate and containerize those VMs to a new Dell PowerEdge MX750c compute sled running the same version of vSphere with VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes.
• Finally, we measured OLTP performance and looked at how it would allow consolidation in the new, containerized MySQL environment.

Benefits of App Modernization with Dell PowerEdge MX7000 and VMware Tanzu

The PowerEdge MX is designed for the software-defined data center—able to support a combination of dense virtualization, software-defined storage, software-defined networking, artificial intelligence, and big data projects. PowerEdge MX, with its kinetic infrastructure, is uniquely designed without a mid-plane, enabling support for multiple generations of technology releases—processor technologies, new storage types and new connectivity innovations—well into the future. By creating on-the-fly hardware capacity, overprovisioning and stranded assets are reduced as performance and efficiency are optimized.

Whether your target application is e-commerce, a critical financial application, or some other business-specific application, the process of application modernization encompasses the whole range of things you can do to an application to:

• Simplify management and maintenance
• Test the app more efficiently
• Ship new versions more quickly
• Scale the app more easily
• Utilize modern infrastructure
• Decrease costs

Dell PowerEdge MX provides an intelligent and modular framework that enables data and workload mobility across the infrastructure, while VMware Tanzu speeds the overall application modernization, making that process simpler, more agile and efficient, and less costly.

So, when you pair PowerEdge MX with VMware Tanzu, it combines software designed, customizable modules of compute, storage, and networking with a modular cloud native application platform that gets apps to production faster and adapts quickly to changing business, customer, and security requirements.

Finally, the goal of application modernization should be to deliver the specific set of benefits you need, not all possible benefits. Successful application modernization depends on choosing the right applications, processes, and tools. VMware Tanzu container technology brings various benefits by packaging applications and their run-time environments into executable modules of software that have a small footprint, are portable, are easy to build and deploy, and optimized to have low runtime overhead. In this way, VMware Tanzu delivers the expertise and advanced tooling to help an organization's modernization journey.

Resources

To access the reports of the study, see the following:

• Infographic: Application Modernization Benefits with Dell PowerEdge and VMware Tanzu
• White paper: Application Modernization Benefits with Dell PowerEdge and VMware Tanzu
• Science: The Science Behind: Application Modernization Benefits with Dell PowerEdge and VMware Tanzu

Author: Thomas MM

About the author: Thomas works in the technical marketing team that focuses on Dell PowerEdge with VMware software. With vast experience in the IT industry in various roles, Thomas specializes in PowerEdge servers and VMware software and works to create technical collateral that highlights the many unique benefits of running VMware software on PowerEdge servers for Dell and VMware customers and partners.