
Introducing the PowerFlex Management Pack for vRealize Operations
Mon, 02 Nov 2020 13:09:42 -0000
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By Vineeth A C
Achieving operation efficiency in today’s modern cloud infrastructure brings automation to the forefront. Centralized visibility provides a key piece of the insight needed to understand if there are operational inefficiencies for taking actions that mitigate business disruption.
We are pleased to share the general availability of Dell EMC PowerFlex Management Pack for vRealize Operations 8.x. The PowerFlex MP for vROps extends the visibility of PowerFlex systems into vROps where IT can monitor their complete data center and cloud operations. It is available to all PowerFlex rack and appliance customers at no additional cost. This brings additional value to the comprehensive IT operations management functionality delivered by PowerFlex Manager that enables full life cycle management of the unified compute and software defined storage solution.
The management pack queries and collects key PowerFlex metrics for storage, compute, networking, and server hardware using APIs and ingests into vROps that can be visualized using the out-of-the-box dashboards. It also provides a detailed system level view that shows the health status and relationship between different components of the PowerFlex system.
Key features and capabilities
Dashboards: The management pack includes 13 default dashboards showing details of PowerFlex storage, PowerFlex Manager, PowerFlex nodes, network switches, ESXi hosts, and clusters. These configurable dashboards provide user customizable data displays that adjust to meet a wide variety of requirements.
Predefined symptoms and alert definitions: The management pack includes 166 symptom definitions and 152 alert definitions based on engineering best practices for the PowerFlex systems. Symptoms and alerts can be customized by the user to meet the demand of their environment.
Historical data: This is available for all PowerFlex Adapter resource kinds. This data provides a view of consumption over time and includes capacity forecasting based on usage for PowerFlex storage.
Network topology and relationship: The topology tree functionality available in vROps is extremely useful when mapping relationships between nodes, network interfaces, switch port, VLAN, port-channel, and vPC.
Detailed metric collection: In addition to the default dashboards, users have the option of drilling into specific metrics for nearly all available data from the components of PowerFlex system, even if it is not included in a dashboard.
Multiple PowerFlex systems awareness: Ability to group and differentiate multiple PowerFlex systems.
PowerFlex node type differentiation: Ability to identify and classify compute, storage, hyperconverged, and management controller nodes.
Sample dashboards
PowerFlex Details: This dashboard shows all the PowerFlex storage KPIs with historical data providing a view of storage performance utilization over time.
PowerFlex Node Summary: You can monitor the health status of all your PowerFlex nodes and its hardware components in this dashboard.
PowerFlex Networking Performance: This dashboard shows network KPIs like throughput, errors, packet discards with historical data providing a view of network utilization over time.
For customers who have already invested in vRealize Operations, this management pack is a great value add to monitor their PowerFlex systems. It is an end-to-end monitoring and alerting solution for PowerFlex infrastructure using vROps. It helps customers significantly in terms of capacity planning based on the historical data of resource consumption over time. It also helps to identify usage trends and provides insight to understand if there are operational issues/ inefficiencies for taking necessary actions to avoid service outages and mitigate business disruption. This integration with VMware vRealize Operations reduces operational complexity by using a unified platform to monitor and manage private data center infrastructure, as well as hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
References
- Download the PowerFlex Management Pack from the Flexera portal.
- Visit Infohub for product documentation.
- Visit PowerFlex site for complete information about PowerFlex software-defined storage.
Related Blog Posts

Deploying Tanzu Application Services on Dell EMC PowerFlex
Tue, 15 Dec 2020 14:35:58 -0000
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Introduction
Tanzu Application Service (TAS) architecture provides the best approach available today to enable agility at scale with the reliability that is must to address these challenges. PowerFlex family offers key value propositions of traditional and cloud-native production workloads, deployment flexibility, linear scalability, predictable high performance, and enterprise-grade resilience.
Tanzu Application Service (TAS)
The VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS) is based on Cloud Foundry –an open-source cloud application platform that provides a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. Cloud Foundry is a multi-cloud platform for the deployment, management, and continuous delivery of applications, containers, and functions. TAS abstracts away the process of setting up and managing an application runtime environment so that developers can focus solely on their applications and associated data. Running a single command—cf push—creates a scalable environment for your application in seconds, which might otherwise take hours to spin up manually. TAS allows developers to deploy and deliver software quickly, without the need of managing the underlying infrastructure.
PowerFlex
PowerFlex (previously VxFlex OS) is the software foundation of PowerFlex software-defined storage. It is a unified compute, storage and networking solution delivering scale-out block storage service designed to deliver flexibility, elasticity, and simplicity with predictable high performance and resiliency at scale.
The PowerFlex platform is available in multiple consumption options to help customers meet their project and data center requirements. PowerFlex appliance and PowerFlex rack provide customers comprehensive IT Operations Management (ITOM) and life cycle management (LCM) of the entire infrastructure stack in addition to sophisticated high-performance, scalable, resilient storage services. PowerFlex appliance and PowerFlex rack are the two preferred and proactively marketed consumption options. PowerFlex is also available on VxFlex Ready Nodes for those customers interested in software-defined compliant hardware without the ITOM and LCM capabilities.
PowerFlex software-define storage with unified compute and networking offers flexibility of deployment architecture to help best meet the specific deployment and architectural requirements. PowerFlex can be deployed in a two-layer for asymmetrical scaling of compute and storage for “right-sizing capacities, single-layer (HCI), or in mixed architecture.
Deploying TAS on PowerFlex
For this example, a PowerFlex production cluster is set up using a Hyperconverged configuration. The production cluster has connectivity to the customer-data network and the private backend PowerFlex storage network. The PowerFlex production cluster consists of a minimum of four servers that host the workload and PowerFlex storage VMs. All the nodes are part of a single ESXi Cluster and part of the same PowerFlex Cluster. Each node contributes all their internal disk resources to PowerFlex cluster.
The PowerFlex management software manages the capacity of all of the disks and acts as a back-end for data access by presenting storage volumes to be consumed by the applications running on the nodes. PowerFlex Manager also provides the essential operational controls and lifecycle management tools. The production cluster hosts the compute nodes that are used for deployment of TAS VMs. TAS components are deployed across three dedicated compute clusters that are designated as three availability zones. These compute clusters are managed by the same 'compute workload' vCenter as the dedicated Edge cluster. The following figure depicts the layout in the lab environment:
Figure 1. PowerFlex production cluster
The compute infrastructure illustrates the best practice architecture using 3 AZ’s using PowerFlex rack in hyperconverged configured nodes. This design ensures the high availability of nodes (i.e., nodes in AZ1 will still function if AZ2 or AZ3 goes down). A dedicated compute cluster in each AZ’s combines to form Isolation Zone (IZ). These AZ’s can be used to deploy and run the TAS stateful workloads requiring persistent storage. On the PowerFlex storage we have created volumes in the backend which are being mapped to vSphere as Datastores.
PowerFlex storage distributed data layout scheme is designed to maximize protection and optimize performance. A single volume is divided into chunks. These chunks will be distributed (striped) on physical disks throughout the cluster, in a balanced and random manner. Each chunk has a total of two copies for redundancy.
PowerFlex can be feature configured optionally to achieve additional data redundancy by enabling the feature Fault sets. Persistent Storage for each AZ could be its own PowerFlex cluster. By implementing PowerFlex feature Fault sets we can ensure that the persistent data availability all time. Fault Sets are subgroup of SDS s (Software defined Storage) installed on host servers within a Protection Domain. PowerFlex OS will mirror data for a Fault Set on SDSs that are outside the Fault Set. Thus, availability is assured even if all the servers within one Fault Set fail simultaneously.
PowerFlex enables flexible scale out capabilities for your data center also provides unparalleled elasticity and scalability. Start with a small environment for your proof of concept or a new application and add nodes as needed when requirements evolve.
The solution mentioned in this blog provides recommendations for deploying a highly available and production-ready Tanzu Application Service on Dell EMC PowerFlex rack infrastructure platform to meet the performance, scalability, resiliency, and availability requirements and describes its hardware and software components. For complete information, see Tanzu Application Services on PowerFlex rack - Solution Guide.
References

Demystifying CSI plug-in for PowerFlex (persistent volumes) with Red Hat OpenShift
Wed, 14 Oct 2020 18:12:01 -0000
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Raghvendra Tripathi
SunilKumar HS
The Container Storage Interface (CSI) is a standard for exposing file and block storage to containerized workloads on Kubernetes, OpenShift and so on. CSI helps third-party storage providers (for example PowerFlex) to write plugins for OpenShift to consume storage from backends as persistent storage.
CSI architecture
CSI driver for Dell EMC VxFlex OS can be installed using Dell EMC Storage CSI Operator. It is a community operator and can be deployed using OperatorHub.io.
Master nodes components do not communicate directly with CSI driver. It interacts only with API server on Master nodes. It MUST watch the Kubernetes API and trigger the appropriate CSI operations against it. Kubelet discovers CSI drivers using kubelet plug-in registration mechanism. It directly issues calls to CSI driver.
CSI components
External Provisioner –The CSI external provisioner is a sidecar container that watches the k8s API server for PersistentVolumeClaim objects. It calls CreateVolume against the specified CSI endpoint to provision a volume.
External Attacher – The CSI external attacher is a sidecar container that watches the API server for VolumeAttachment objects and triggers controller [Publish|Unpublish] volume operations against a CSI endpoint.
Driver Registrar
- Node-driver-registrar – The CSI node driver registrar is a sidecar container that fetches driver information from a CSI endpoint and registers it with the kubelet on that node.
- Cluster-driver-registrar – The CSI cluster driver registrar is a sidecar container that registers a CSI driver with a k8s cluster by creating a CSIDriver object.
CSI Controller plug-in – The controller component can be deployed as a Deployment or StatefulSet on any node in the cluster. It consists of the CSI driver that implements the CSI Controller service.
CSI Identity – It enables k8s components and CSI containers to identify the driver.
CSI Node Plugin –The node component should be deployed on every node in the cluster through a DaemonSet. It consists of the CSI driver that implements the CSI Node service and the node driver registrar sidecar container.
CSI and Persistent Storage
Storage within OpenShift Container Platform 4.x is managed from worker nodes. The CSI API uses two new resources: PersistentVolume (PV) and PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) objects.
Persistent Volumes – Kubernetes provides physical storage devices to the cluster in the form of objects called Persistent Volumes.
apiVersion: v1 kind: PersistentVolume spec: accessModes: - ReadWriteOnce capacity: storage: 104Gi claimRef: apiVersion: v1 kind: PersistentVolumeClaim name: test-vol namespace: powerflex . . csi: driver: csi-vxflexos.dellemc.com fsType: ext4
persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Delete storageClassName: powerflex-vxflexos volumeMode: Filesystem status: phase: Bound |
Persistent Volume Claim – This object lets pods use storage from Persistent Volumes.
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim apiVersion: v1 metadata: name: test-vol namespace: powerflex spec: accessModes: - ReadWriteOnce volumeMode: Filesystem resources: requests: storage: 100Gi storageClassName: powerflex-vxflexos |
Storage Class – This object helps you create PV/PVC pair for pods. It stores information about creating a persistent volume.
apiVersion: storage.dell.com/v1 kind: CSIVXFlexOS spec: storageClass: - name: powerflexos - key: csi-vxflexos.dellemc.com/X_CSI_VXFLEXOS_SYSTEMNAME values: - csi-vxflexos.dellemc.com . . . - name: powerflex-xfs parameters: storagepool: pool2 FsType: xfs allowedTopologies: - matchLabelExpressions: - key: csi-vxflexos.dellemc.com/X_CSI_VXFLEXOS_SYSTEMNAME values: - csi-vxflexos.dellemc.com |
CSI driver capabilities
Static Provisioning – This allows you to manually make existing PowerFlex storage available to the cluster.
Dynamic Provisioning - Storage volumes can be created on-demand. Storage resources are dynamically provisioned using the provisioner that is specified by the StorageClass object.
Retain Reclaiming – Once PersistentVolumeClaim is deleted, the corresponding PersistentVolume is not deleted rather moved to Released state and its data can be manually recovered.
Delete Reclaiming – It is the default reclaim policy and unlike Retain policy persistent volume is deleted.
Access Mode - ReadWriteOnce -- the volume can be mounted as read/write by a single node.
Supported FS - ext4/xfs.
Raw Block Volumes: Using Raw block option, PV can be attached to pod or app directly without formatting with ext4 or xfs file system.