Execute Flawlessly – Comply Effortlessly – Be Confident

The summer 2021 release of Dell EMC PowerFlex Software-defined Infrastructure extends the PowerFlex family’s transformational superpowers, providing businesses with the agility to thrive in ever-changing economic and technological landscapes. The release of PowerFlex 3.6 and PowerFlex Manager 3.7 enables customers to supercharge their mission-critical workloads with enhanced automation and platform options. It safeguards workload execution with expanded continuity and compliance offerings. And businesses running PowerFlex can be confident in predictable outcomes at scale with new infrastructure insights, network resiliency enhancements, and integrated upgrade guidance. 

Keep an eye on the important stuff

A highlight of this release is PowerFlex integration with Dell EMC CloudIQ, a cloud-based application that intelligently and proactively monitors the health of Dell EMC storage, data protection, HCI and other systems. Users can enjoy a single UI for multi-system, multi-site PowerFlex monitoring that includes system health, configuration/inventory, capacity usage, and performance.  The PowerFlex system must be first connected to Dell EMC Secure Remote Services (SRS), and then CloudIQ is automatically enabled. Health scores are based on health check algorithms that use capacity, performance, configuration, components, and data protection criteria whose value is informed by PowerFlex alert data. Users can opt in to get health notifications via email or mobile phones, and the history of generated and cleared health issues is maintained for two years. After ingesting a couple of weeks of data, CloudIQ machine learning will begin looking for and noting IOPS and bandwidth anomalies. It also watches for and signals latency performance impacts.

For information on adding your PowerFlex system(s) to CloudIQ see the  Knowledge Base article. And to get a hands-on look at PowerFlex in CloudIQ, check out the online Simulator (log in with your support account) and see technical white papers and demo recordings on www.delltechnologies.com/cloudiq.

Be safe with your data out there

PowerFlex native asynchronous replication was introduced last year with version 3.5. Now, in PowerFlex 3.6, we have made it even more flexible and improved compliance targets. We cut the minimum RPO in half and now support RPOs as low as 15 seconds. We also added tooling to improve control over Replication Consistency Groups (RCGs) – sets of PowerFlex volumes being replicated together. RCGs can now be active or inactive, where inactive RCGs hold their configuration but use no additional system resources. The ability to terminate an RCG and leave it in an inactive state also improves the recovery process if a user runs out of journal capacity.

With this release, PowerFlex supports replication in VMware HCI environments. In this scenario, PowerFlex Manager 3.7 (and above) orchestrates resizing the Storage Virtual Machines (SVMs) and the addition of the Storage Data Replicators (SDRs) into the system. Because the orchestration is done by PowerFlex Manager, the option to replicate between PowerFlex HCI deployments running VMware is limited to appliance and rack deployments. 

Systems running 3.5.x can be active replication peers with systems running 3.6, and the source and destination systems can be on different code versions long term. For further information about PowerFlex replication architecture, limitations and design considerations, see the Dell EMC PowerFlex: Introduction to Replication white paper.

Along with these internal replication improvements, we are introducing integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) – disaster recovery management and automation software for virtual machines and their workloads. The PowerFlex Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) enables PowerFlex as the native replication engine for protecting VMs on vSphere datastores. The PowerFlex SRA is compatible with SRM 8.2 or 8.3, the Photon OS-based SRM appliances. And while we are introducing this with the current releases, the SRA is compatible with PowerFlex systems running 3.5.1.x and above. Users can create recovery plans to failover VMs to another site, fail back to the original, or use PowerFlex’s non-disruptive replication failover testing to run failover tests in SRM. 

The SRA and installation instructions are available for download from the VMware website. For detailed information about the SRA implementation and usage examples, see the whitepaper on Disaster Recovery for Virtualized Workloads Dell EMC PowerFlex using VMware Site Recovery Manager.

The following figure shows an architecture overview of PowerFlex SRA and VMware SRM: 

PowerFlex native replication, and the integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager, provide robust, crash-consistent data protection for disaster recovery and business continuity. But we are also introducing integration with Dell EMC AppSync for application-consistent copy lifecycle management. For customers using the wide range of supported databases and filesystems, AppSync v4.3 adds support for PowerFlex, seamlessly bringing PowerFlex’s superpowers into AppSync’s simplified copy data management. AppSync has deep integrations with Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, and SAP HANA, and it enables VM-consistent copies of data stores and individual VM recovery for VMware environments. But it can also support other enterprise applications – like EPIC Cache, DB2, MySQL, etc. – through file system copies.

AppSync with PowerFlex integration will be available mid-July 2021. For information and examples, see the Dell EMC PowerFlex and AppSync integration video. 

One more note on security. PowerFlex rack and appliance are now FIPS 140-2 compliant for data at rest and key management. Hardware based data at rest encryption is achieved using supported self-encrypting drives (SEDs), with the encryption engine running on the SEDs to deliver better performance and security. The SEDs based encryption claim is based on FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certification. Dell EMC CloudLink, the KMIP and FIPS 140-2 Level 1 (CloudLink Agent and CloudLink Server) compliant key manager, is used to manage SEDs encryption keys.

Automate (and containerize) all the things

PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure is eminently suited to cloud-native use cases and automatable workflows. There has been a lot of recent progress in PowerFlex’s support for these ecosystems. The Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver for PowerFlex continues to evolve, with support for accessing multiple PowerFlex clusters, ephemeral inline volumes, and importantly a containerized PowerFlex Storage Data Client (SDC) deployment and management. The containerized SDC allows CSI to inject the PowerFlex volume driver into the kernel of container-optimized operating systems that lack package managers. This provides PowerFlex CSI support for Red Hat CoreOS and Fedora Core OS. And it also enables integration of PowerFlex with RedHat OpenShift 4.6 and greater. The forthcoming CSI version 1.5 adds support for volume consistency groups and custom file system format options. Users can set specific disk format command parameters when provisioning a volume. Star and watch the GitHub Repository for the PowerFlex CSI Driver for updates.

In addition to this, Dell Technologies has been developing a set of Container Storage Modules (CSM) that complement the CSI drivers. PowerFlex is at the forefront of that effort, and there are several modules available for tech preview, with general availability coming later this year.

• Observability CSM: Provides exportable telemetry metrics for I/O performance & storage usage, for consumption in tools like Grafana and Prometheus. Bridges the observability gap between Kubernetes and PowerFlex storage admins.
• Authorization CSM: Provides a set of RBAC tools for PowerFlex and Kubernetes. This is an out-of-band tool proxying admin credentials and enabling the management of storage consumers and their limits (e.g., tenant segmentation, storage quota limits, isolation, auditing, etc.).
• Resiliency CSM: Provides stateful application fault protection & detection, resiliency for node failure and network disruptions. Reschedules failed pods on new resources and asks the CSI driver to un-map and re-map the persistent storage volumes to the online nodes.

Users can automate volume and snapshot lifecycle management with the PowerFlex Ansible Modules. They can also use the modules to gather facts about their PowerFlex systems and manage various storage pool and SDC details. The Ansible modules are available on GitHub and Ansible Galaxy. They work with Ansible 2.9 or later and require the PowerFlex Python SDK (which may also be used by itself to facilitate authentication to and interaction with a PowerFlex cluster). Again, watch the repositories for additional modules and expansions in the near future.

All these automation tools leverage and rely upon the PowerFlex REST API. And Dell Technologies has introduced a new Developer Portal, where the APIs for many products can be explored. The PowerFlex API, along with explanations and usage examples, can be found at https://developer.dell.com/apis/4008/versions/3.6/docs. 

Always keep on improving

With every release, PowerFlex and PowerFlex Manager get faster, more secure, and more easily manageable. In PowerFlex 3.6 there are a number of UI enhancements, including simplification of menus, better capacity reporting around data reduction, a new dedicated area for snapshots and snapshot policy management, and – following on Dell Technologies’ drive towards more inclusive language – a change in the labels for the MDM cluster roles. “Master” and “Slave” roles are now “Primary” and “Secondary”. 

PowerFlex 3.6 introduces support for Oracle Linux Virtualization (KVM based), which adds a supported hypervisor layer to the previous support for Oracle Enterprise Linux. This advances the numerous Oracle database deployments on PowerFlex, providing improved Oracle supportability while still offering the great cost-effectiveness PowerFlex offers for running Oracle. For detailed information on installing and configuring, please refer to the Oracle Linux KVM on PowerFlex white paper. 

In the software-defined storage layer itself, version 3.6 doubles the number of Storage Data Clients (the consumers of PowerFlex volumes) per system to 2048. This doubles the number of hosts that can map volumes from PowerFlex storage pools. The software is also smarter when it comes to detecting and handling network error cases. In some disaggregated, or two-layer, systems where the SDCs live on a separate network than the storage cluster itself, a network path impairment between an SDC and a single Storage Data Server (SDS) node can cause I/O failures – even when there isn’t a general network failure in the cluster. In version 3.6 if such a disruption occurs, the SDC can use another SDS in the system to proxy the I/O to its original destination. Users are alerted until the problem is cleared, but I/O continues uninterrupted.

Because of the highly distributed architecture of PowerFlex, ports or sockets experiencing frequent disconnects (flapping), can cause overall system performance issues. 3.6 detects this and proactively disqualifies the path, preventing general disruption across the system. 

In version 3.5, we introduced Protected Maintenance Mode (PMM), a super-safe way to put a node into maintenance while nevertheless avoiding a lengthy data-rehydration process at the end. Now, PMM makes use of the highly parallel many-to-many rebalancing algorithm, as a node goes into maintenance. Depending on the amount of data stored on the node, this can still be a long process, and other things can change in the system as it’s happening. PowerFlex 3.6 adds an auto-abort feature, in which the system continually scans for hardware or capacity issues that would prevent the node from completely entering PMM. If any flags are raised, the system will abort the process and notify the user.  More information on maintenance modes, and the new PMM auto-abort feature, can be found in this whitepaper. 

PowerFlex Manager 3.7 has gotten much more powerful as well. Foremost among the improvements is a new Compatibility Management feature. This new feature helps customers automatically identify the recommended upgrade paths for both the PowerFlex Manager appliance itself and the system RCM/IC upgrade. Prior to this release, whenever a customer or Dell Professional Services wished to do an upgrade, it took a lot of effort and time to manually investigate the documentation and compatibility matrixes to understand all of the upgrade rules – what are the allowed upgrade paths, which PowerFlex Manager version works with which RCM/IC versions, etc. 

The new Compatibility Management tools eliminate the work and assist users by automatically identifying recommended upgrade paths. To determine which paths are valid and which are not, PowerFlex Manager uses information that is provided in a compatibility matrix file. The compatibility matrix file maps all the known valid and invalid paths for all previous releases of the software. It breaks the possible upgrade paths down as:

• Recommended: tested or implied as tested
• Supported: allowed, but not necessarily tested
• Not Allowed: unsupported update path

PowerFlex Manager 3.7 also introduces support for vSphere 7.0 U2. Upgrading to this version requires a manual vCenter upgrade. But then PowerFlex Manager will take over and manage the ESXi clusters. PowerFlex Manager 3.7 supports VMware ESXi 7.0 Update 2 installation, upgrade, and expansion operations for both hyperconverged and compute-only services. Users can deploy new services, add existing services running VMware ESXi 7.0 U2, or expand existing services. PowerFlex Manager also supports upgrades of VMware ESXi clusters in hyperconverged or compute-only services. You can upgrade VMware ESXi clusters from version 6.5, 6.7, or 7.0 to VMware ESXi 7.0 Update 2.

When you deploy a new ESXi 7.0U2 service, PowerFlex Manager automatically deploys two service volumes and maps these volumes to two heartbeat datastores on shared storage. PowerFlex Manager also deploys three vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) VMs for the cluster.

PowerFlex Manager introduces several other enhancements in this release. It now supports 32k volumes per Service, aligned with PowerFlex core software volume scalability. It has enhanced security for SMB/NFS. A user-specific account is now required to gain access to the SMB share. PowerFlex Manager also updates the NFS share configuration when a user upgrades or restores the virtual appliance. PowerFlex Manager has disabled support for the SMBv1 protocol. PowerFlex Manager now uses SMBv2 or SMBv3 to enhance security.

It has also expanded its management capabilities over the PowerFlex Presentation Server and Gateway services. Prior to this release, PowerFlex Manager could deploy a Presentation Server (which hosts the WebUI) but not upgrade it. Now, PowerFlex Manager 3.7 can both discover existing instances and upgrade Presentation Servers. Similarly, it has gained the ability to upgrade the OS for the Gateway (which hosts the REST API). Prior to this release, PowerFlex Manager could only upgrade the Gateway RPM package without upgrading and patching the OS of the Gateway. Now PowerFlex Manager 3.7 can do both.

But it’s not all about software

This release adds support for a broader array of NVIDIA GPUs. Next-gen NVIDIA acceleration cards are now available for customers looking to run specialized, high-performance computing and analytics applications - Quadro RTX 6000, Quadro RTX 8000, A40, and A100. And we also introduce a small form factor GPU that can be used in the 1U R640-based PowerFlex Nodes – the NVIDIA A100. The past year demonstrated the importance supporting remote workers with virtual desktops, and PowerFlex supports GPU implementations on Citrix and VMware VDI. 

We now support the Dell PowerSwitch S5296F-ON for the PowerFlex appliance. The S5295 has 96x 10/25G SFP28 ports and 8x 100G QSFP28 ports. It can support high node counts in a single cabinet, if the high oversubscription ratio is acceptable. We also introduce support for the Cisco Nexus 93180YC-FX, for use as either an access or an aggregation switch, and the Cisco 9364C-GX, for use as either a leaf or a spine switch, with 64x 100G ports.

Virtualized network infrastructure continues to grow in capability and deployment share. NSX-T™ is VMware's software-defined-network infrastructure that addresses cross-cloud needs for VM-centric network services and security. The PowerFlex appliance now joins the PowerFlex rack, in supporting NSX-T Ready configurations. “NSX-T Ready” means that the hardware configuration meets NSX-T requirements. The customer will provide NSX-T software and deploy with assistance from VMware or Dell Professional Services. The enabling components are: 

• A 4-node PowerFlex management cluster, available to host the NSX-T controller VMs
• Appliance-specific NSX-T edge nodes (need 2 to 8 for running the NSX-T edge services)
• High-level NSX-T topologies and considerations available in the PowerFlex Appliance Network Planning Guide 
• PowerFlex Manager will run the NSX-T edge nodes in Lifecyle Mode

As with the PowerFlex rack, appliance NSX-T edge nodes are “service appliances” that are dedicated to run network services, while the newly available HA appliance management nodes run the NSX-T management VMs. PowerFlex Manager can assist in deploying the edge nodes and will lifecycle the hardware aspects. 

Wrap it up

Thanks for taking time to read about what’s new with Dell EMC PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure. We haven’t even been able to cover all the great new things being introduced this summer. Supercharge your mission-critical workloads flawlessly with enhanced automation, effortlessly enable business continuity and compliance, and confidently manage your data center operations at scale. To continue exploring, visit us on the Dell Technologies website for PowerFlex.