Introduction

In today's digital landscape, organizations across various industries are generating and accumulating amazing sums of data. To harness the potential of this explosive data growth, businesses heavily rely on cluster computing. Managing these clusters effectively is critical to optimizing performance and ensuring continuous operations. VxRail clusters provide massive amounts of automation right out-of-the-box, which helps administrators accomplish significantly more.

But as the number of clusters grows, a centralized management interface becomes more and more valuable. That’s why I wanted to talk to you about CloudIQ today and introduce three exciting new features:

• Support for 2-node and stretched vSAN clusters
• DPU monitoring
• Performance anomaly detection with historical seasonality

These advancements revolutionize cluster management because they offer enhanced efficiency, flexibility, and performance to meet the evolving needs of modern enterprises.

The evolution of cloud-based cluster management

Traditional on-premises cluster management frequently presents challenges with hardware maintenance, scalability issues, and costly infrastructure investments. Cluster management with CloudIQ has proved to be a game-changer, allowing businesses to centralize the management of hardware and infrastructure to a single cloud-based tool.

By combining VxRail automation with CloudIQ, enterprises can focus on optimizing their applications and workflows while more easily handling cluster provisioning, scaling, and maintenance. This paradigm shift not only improves resource allocation and utilization. It also enables organizations to adapt more quickly to dynamic workloads.

2-Node and stretched vSAN cluster support for CloudIQ

In response to diverse business needs, CloudIQ now supports two additional cluster deployment types: the 2-node and stretched vSAN clusters.

2-Node Clusters

Traditionally, clusters required a minimum of three nodes to maintain high availability, because having an odd number of nodes helped avoid split-brain scenarios. However, 2-node clusters can also address this challenge and ensure fault tolerance and high availability.

2-node clusters use advanced quorum mechanisms, allowing them to make decisions efficiently despite the lack of a third node. The nodes in the cluster communicate with each other and decide on quorum, based on various factors like network connectivity, storage health, and other cluster components. This setup significantly reduces infrastructure costs and is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses that require robust cluster management without the expense of additional nodes. 2-node clusters populate in the same location in CloudIQ as the rest of your clusters. They can be found by selecting the Systems option under the Monitor tab. After you select Systems, select the HCI inventory option and your enrolled VxRail clusters will populate there.

Stretched vSAN clusters

Businesses often want to deploy clusters across multiple geographically distributed data centers to improve disaster recovery and enhance business continuity. Stretched VxRail clusters with vSAN provide an excellent solution by extending vSAN technology across multiple data centers.

Key benefits of stretched VxRail clusters with vSAN include:

1. Disaster Recovery: By replicating data between data centers, these clusters protect against site-wide outages, ensuring that operations continue seamlessly in case of a data center failure.
2. Load Balancing: Stretched clusters intelligently distribute workloads across different data centers, based on demand, to optimize resource utilization and performance.
3. Data Locality: Organizations can maintain data locality to comply with regional data regulations and reduce data access latency for end-users across different geographical regions.

Data Processing Unit Reporting

In a clustered environment, data processing units (DPUs) can become critical for efficient resource management. DPUs are hardware accelerators designed to handle specific data processing tasks, like NSX and other tasks handled by the vSphere Distributed Services Engine, to enhance overall cluster performance for specific workloads.

The Data Processing Unit Reporting feature provides insight into the details of DPUs within the cluster. Cluster administrators can view the hardware information for each DPU, including: the host name of each server with a DPU, the model, the OS version running on the host, the slot the DPU is installed in, each DPU’s serial number, and their manufacturer.

Performance Anomaly Detection

Unanticipated performance fluctuations can significantly impact application responsiveness and overall user experience. To address this concern, CloudIQ now integrates Performance Anomaly Detection—an intelligent monitoring feature that proactively identifies performance issues as they develop.

How does Performance Anomaly Detection work?

This feature uses machine learning algorithms to establish baseline performance patterns for various cluster metrics, including CPU utilization, memory utilization, power consumption, and networking.

When configured, the system continuously monitors real-time performance metrics and compares them to the baseline.

When CloudIQ detects any deviations from the expected behavior, it can raise alerts, enabling administrators to investigate and rectify potential problems immediately. This proactive approach ensures that performance issues are addressed before they affect critical operations, reducing downtime and enhancing user satisfaction.

Conclusion

As the demand for efficient data processing and storage continues to grow, cloud-based cluster management becomes vital for modern enterprises. The introduction of 2-node and stretched vSAN cluster support, data processing unit reporting, and performance anomaly detection takes cluster management to new heights. By leveraging the cutting-edge features of CloudIQ with VxRail, business organizations can unlock unparalleled efficiency, scalability, and performance, gaining a competitive advantage in today's fast-paced digital landscape. Embracing cloud-based cluster management with CloudIQ and its new features will undoubtedly pave the way for a bright and productive future for organizations and industries of all sizes.

Author: Dylan Jackson

This is the fifth article in a series introducing VxRail concepts.

Every tool or piece of equipment out there requires maintenance of some kind. That’s as true for the cars we drive as it is for the servers, storage, and switches that power our data centers. However, a lot of data center maintenance is reactive. Look at hardware failure as an example. If a drive were to fail in one of your clusters, nothing would happen until IT staff respond. VxRail offers the ability to automate some of these responses. Let’s talk about what happens when things go sideways in a cluster’s life. 

Help Righting the Ship

One of the roles that the VxRail Manager VM fills is a centralized alert collector. VxRail integrates with the iDRAC to monitor hardware health and with vCenter to monitor VMware software, in addition to its own internal alerts and events. VxRail monitors all this information and creates a more holistic monitoring system for a cluster. This obviously benefits IT staff, but there are some additional benefits to this multi-level integration that other solutions might struggle to match.

VxRail uses a service called “Secure Connect Gateway” to establish a static connection to Dell data centers. This enables a lot of functionality on VxRail, including with CloudIQ for multi-cluster management, but that’s the subject of a future discussion. This static connection helps technical support become more proactive in helping you recover your clusters. For example, say you had a disk fail. If Secure Connect Gateway is enabled, VxRail would dial home and create a case automatically. Support could then use this to confirm the disk failure and confirm that there aren’t any other hardware or software issues being raised. Depending on what warranty services you have, you could even opt to have a replacement hard drive sent out automatically. It wasn’t uncommon for me to see support cases where we were the first to let the administrators know that there was an issue. It was definitely nice to be able to tell them a correction was already on its way out to them.

These phone homes that go through the Secure Connect Gateway add more value than helping to automate parts of some dispatches. The gateway also aids in the support experience. It can do this in a few ways, including providing an integrated support chat applet, accessible from the VxRail Support tab in vCenter. Secure Connect Gateway also facilitates the transfer of the system logs needed to troubleshoot most any problem in the VxRail stack. These logs include the VxRail Manager virtual machine logs, vCenter logs, ESXi logs, iDRAC logs, and platform logs. vCenter and ESXi logs obviously are logs specific to the software powering the cluster. The iDRAC and platform logs contain the hardware inventory, LCM activity, out-of-band hardware log, and more. 

I’ve touched on a lot of topics surrounding the support experience, but there’s one more that absolutely needs to be mentioned—that’s the people in support! The technical support staff standing behind VxRail are a very talented and knowledgeable group of folks. Many of these agents are VMware Certified Professionals, some looking for higher levels of certification, like the VCIX, one of VMware’s expert level certifications. This cumulative knowledge pool allows our support team to resolve over 95% of the incidents they encounter without needing a higher-level VMware engagement. However, in the instances where a VMware engagement is needed, say that a bug is discovered with vCenter for example, then VxRail support can escalate to VMware on the end customer’s behalf. This helps to create continuity in the support experience that might be missing from a solution without the jointly engineered nature of VxRail.

Conclusion

Servicing clusters can become a challenge, no matter the environment. Hardware and software both encounter failures that require an IT staff response. As environments grow and scale, the challenge of maintaining health for the environment grows, too. To help meet this expanding problem, VxRail helps administrators by automatically collecting events and alerts from the hardware and both VMware and VxRail software. This information can then be compressed into log bundles that can be shared with support. Contacting support is even easier, thanks to an integrated chat connecting your host to VxRail support staff. These support staff are specialists in both VMware and VxRail software, capable of resolving a vast majority of all issues with a single vendor. Our final discussion will be on the extensibility of VxRail, featuring CloudIQ and the VxRail API. See you there!