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NATIVE HYBRID CLOUD, VSPHERE EDITION WITH VXRAIL Reference Architecture 1.2.1 January 2017
ABSTRACT
Native Hybrid Cloud is a production environment for cloud native applications. It is integrated with VxRail™ Appliance, a cloud computing environment based on VMware vSphere.
H15341.2
REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE
Copyright
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The information in this publication is provided as is. Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Use, copying, and distribution of any software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.
Copyright © 2017 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell, EMC, and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Other trademarks may be the property of their respective owners. Published in the USA 01/17 Reference Architecture H15341.2.
Dell EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.
Contents
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Contents
Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................ 4
We value your feedback! ................................................................................................................ 6
Solution architecture ...................................................................................................................... 7
Solution architecture key components ....................................................................................... 15
Native Hybrid Cloud technology overview ................................................................................. 15
VxRail Appliance technology overview ....................................................................................... 18
Installation and configuration ...................................................................................................... 20
Customer support ......................................................................................................................... 20
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 21
References ..................................................................................................................................... 22
Executive Summary
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Executive Summary Businesses are embracing hyper-converged infrastructure and cloud native frameworks to disrupt conventional business models, differentiate themselves from competitors, and explore new business opportunities. A requirement for growing a business is the ability to analyze consumer data and rapidly and continuously deliver new, innovative, and unique content to consumers. Consumers have come to expect applications to always be available, secure, and updated.
This trend is driving a shift in application production platforms and processes. Application developers are moving to new practices and technologies like development and operations (DevOps), continuous delivery, agile methodology, twelve-factor application frameworks, microservices, and API-based collaboration. These practices and technologies speed application production and quickly deploy features into production. However, most businesses encounter challenges when transitioning to new practices and technologies.
Application development groups wrestle with decisions about the best system to manage growing application production needs. Short-term revenue goals can displace proper planning for an integrated application production environment. Consequently, disparate applications are installed at different times in various functional areas, resulting in process inefficiencies and software and hardware integration challenges.
The availability of the public cloud and the ease with which it can be accessed creates the perception that it is easy for IT to duplicate the same level of service in-house. Planning, designing, and building a private cloud to support cloud native applications can be a complex project that takes too long if you must provide a solution to address immediate business needs. IT also must maintain and manage the infrastructure supporting these new applications to ensure that the environment is reliable, secure, and maintainable.
The performance and convenience that is offered by an integrated production environment, which is based on cloud computing and storage, addresses these challenges. An integrated production environment can also help application developers decrease the time to market, increase operational agility, and facilitate automated deployment of applications.
As a result, IT managers must make difficult decisions when implementing or creating a cost-effective, cloud-based software development environment. Dell EMC has solved these challenges with Native Hybrid Cloud.
Native Hybrid Cloud is an engineered solution which integrates with an elastic infrastructure and monitoring tools to support an application production environment. Native Hybrid Cloud provides a predictable, accurate, and protected Pivotal CF deployment that is sized correctly and installed on VxRail™ Appliance, a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) that is powered by vSphere.
Native Hybrid Cloud provides an optimized and pre-tuned end-to-end modern developer platform. Native Hybrid Cloud accelerates the development cycle of cloud native applications, and allows businesses to deliver new and unique capabilities to market as quickly as possible.
Business case
Solution overview
Executive Summary
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VxRail Appliance hardware sizing configurations are based on expected Pivotal CF usage and system testing. The virtual infrastructure is sized based on Pivotal CF usage. The Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting dashboard monitors and transparently reports consumption and billing information. IT professionals can easily monitor and manage the VxRail and vSphere resources, and independently scale them. This helps ensure Native Hybrid Cloud meets both current and future software production needs.
Native Hybrid Cloud enables organizations to quickly begin using an on-premises, cloud native development platform, without the cost, time, complexity, or uncertainty associated with adopting an in-house build your own solution.
The VxRail Appliance and subsequent Native Hybrid Cloud deployments are planned to meet current and future software development needs. Dell EMC Professional Services also helps with installing and testing VxRail Appliance and deploying Native Hybrid Cloud in your IT environment. IT professionals tasked with planning compute, network, and storage capacity can work with Dell EMC Professional Services to determine the recommended amount of each depending on the size of the solution.
Native Hybrid Cloud enables developers to create cloud native applications in multiple programming languages and track application quality. The platform is based on an integrated infrastructure, which enables IT operators to easily monitor, manage, and scale the development environment.
Native Hybrid Cloud uses VMware Virtual SAN to spread data, applications, and virtual machines on volumes across multiple physical nodes. Virtual SAN provides data resiliency if one of the physical nodes is unavailable. If a physical node is unavailable, any data handled by Native Hybrid Cloud is still persistent. Native Hybrid Cloud backup and restore features, combined with Virtual SAN data resiliency, ensure that data can be restored in case of failure.
Integration with Microsoft Active Directory servers makes it easier to manage users, roles, and permissions. VMware vCenter Server, VxRail Manager, Dell EMC Monitoring and Reporting, Pivotal Operations Manager, and Pivotal CF Metrics give you the tools you need to manage and monitor Native Hybrid Cloud. With the Native Hybrid Cloud for VxRail Appliance, customers benefit from:
• A fully tested and integrated software development, deployment, and management solution
• A virtual infrastructure that can be deployed quickly to reduce the time from planning to coding
• A single platform to write, store, and test code and publish applications
• Increased cloud solution portability and agility
• A modern developer platform that boosts developer productivity by combining application services, service discovery, container management, and orchestration with an ecosystem of plugins for developer tools
• Easily managed day 2 operations by providing utilities, metrics, backup and restore features, and security
• A turn-key, private cloud and infrastructure service that eliminates the time IT spends on complex deployments
Key benefits
We value your feedback!
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• An engineered solution that integrates best-in-class open source technologies, professional services, and single call support into an easy to consume and deploy cloud native application development platform
This reference architecture guide describes an engineered solution for managing a cloud native application production platform using Native Hybrid Cloud with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (Pivotal CF), a cloud native platform (CNP), and VxRail Appliance, a private cloud-hosting appliance that uses VMware vSphere Hypervisor.
This guide introduces the main features and functionality of the engineered solution, describes the individual components, and lists the validated hardware and software environments. This guide also describes how the components and functionality of Native Hybrid Cloud and VxRail Appliance are integrated. This reference architecture is not a comprehensive guide to every aspect of the engineered solution.
This reference architecture is for development and operations (DevOps) cloud architects, DevOps cloud operators, or software development managers who want to design, manage, and deploy cloud native applications with Native Hybrid Cloud on VxRail Appliance. Readers should be aware of VxRail Appliance, vSphere, Pivotal CF, virtualization, networking, storage technologies, and general IT functions.
We value your feedback! Dell EMC and the authors of this guide welcome your feedback on the solution and the solution documentation. Contact [email protected] with your comments.
Authors: Sergey Schindler, Eoghan Kelleher, Brian Coe.
Document purpose
Audience
Solution architecture
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Solution architecture The architecture diagrams in this section show the layout of major components comprising Native Hybrid Cloud.
Figure 1 depicts a high-level overview of the physical architecture of Native Hybrid Cloud.
Figure 1. Native Hybrid Cloud physical architecture
The hardware and software provided by VxRail Appliance and Native Hybrid Cloud includes redundant physical and logical network connections to ensure connectivity. Dell EMC Professional Services provides a backup protection service for the Native Hybrid Cloud installation, and Dell EMC Customer Support provides Native Hybrid Cloud installation restoration, if required.
Architecture diagram
Solution architecture
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Table 1 lists the hardware resources for VxRail Systems used with Native Hybrid Cloud.
Table 1. Hardware details for VxRail 3.5
Hardware VxRail 200 VxRail 200F
CPU Dual Intel Xeon E5-2660 v3 2.6 GHz Dual Intel Xeon E5-2660 v3 2.6 GHz
Memory 256 GB or 512 GB 256 GB or 512 GB
Network Dual Port 10 GbE Dual Port 10 GbE
Storage Hybrid drives All flash disks
Hardware Version Notes
VxRail Appliance
3.5 Provides the physical and virtual infrastructure to use Native Hybrid Cloud
Table 2 lists the minimum resource requirements for VxRail 4.0. Dell EMC supports all VxRail configurations that can run Native Hybrid Cloud. Work with Dell EMC Presales and use the PCF Sizing & Cost Estimation Tool to determine the correct amount of compute, memory, network, and storage resources.
Table 2. Hardware details for VxRail 4.0
Hardware Version Minimum resources
VxRail Appliance 4.0 Four physical nodes per VxRail
Table 3 lists the software that is used in the solution.
Table 3. Solution software
Software Version Notes
VMware vCenter 6.0 Update 2 Provides the virtual infrastructure to deploy Native Hybrid Cloud
VxRail Manager 3.5 and 4.0 Used to manage the VxRail Appliance
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
1.9 Facilitates software production
Pivotal Operations Manager
1.9 Provides a graphical interface to manage Pivotal CF components
Pivotal JMX Bridge 1.8.11 Used to help you monitor your installation and assist in troubleshooting
Pivotal Elastic Runtime
1.9 Provides a scalable runtime environment to deploy applications
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting
1.2.1 Used to monitor Native Hybrid Cloud
ViPR SRM 3.7 SP2 Used to monitor Native Hybrid Cloud
Elasticsearch 1.7.1 Used for log collection and analysis
Hardware resources
Software resources
Solution architecture
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Software Version Notes
Logstash 1.5.3 Used for log collection and analysis
Kibana 4.1.1 Used for log collection and analysis
Native Hybrid Cloud integration with external identity providers (IDP) such as Microsoft Active Directory is provided by the separate built-in capabilities of VxRail Appliance, Pivotal CF, and Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting. Dell EMC Professional Services performs IDP integration services for customers.
VxRail Appliance IDP integration VMware vSphere users are defined in an identity source. You can register more than one identity source with the VMware vSphere Web Client. Customers have several identity source options:
• A directory service such as Active Directory or OpenLDAP, and open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
• A database that is internal to the system where VMware vCenter Single Sign-On is installed
• Operating-system users that are local to the system where vCenter Single Sign-On is installed
Pivotal Cloud Foundry IDP integration Pivotal CF Elastic Runtime is connected to a customer’s Active Directory services by integrating the Cloud Foundry User Account and Authentication (UAA) server with LDAP. The Cloud Foundry UAA server provides identity management for Elastic Runtime in several ways:
• Issues tokens for use by client applications when they act on behalf of Elastic Runtime users
• Authenticates users with their Elastic Runtime credentials
• Acts as a single sign-on (SSO) service using Elastic Runtime or other credentials
UAA can be integrated with an LDAP server. Connecting Elastic Runtime to LDAP allows the UAA to authenticate users via LDAP search and bind operations.
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting IDP integration Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting uses a Java interface in Apache Tomcat to connect to an externally managed security server (LDAP/Active Directory). This interface consists of multiple plug-ins that support connections to different types of user access databases.
The LDAP authentication mechanism uses JNDIRealm. Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) is a set of APIs used to interact with naming services and directory services. Realm is a database that Tomcat uses to identify authorized web-application users. The default realm in Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting is a local realm. In this configuration, the user accounts and roles are stored in the local master database.
When an LDAP user logs in to Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting, a new external user entry is created in the local database so that the administrator can add
Integration with external identity providers
Solution architecture
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access rights. Dell EMC Professional Services or an expert administrator edits the corresponding configuration file to integrate Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting LDAP/Active Directory.
Pivotal CF Elastic Runtime network components provide load balancing and high availability. Elastic Runtime includes an HAProxy load balancer for terminating the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).
Pivotal CF strongly recommends using an external load balancer and can also use an existing load balancer or a load balancer farm in the customer environment. The load balancer provides full Pivotal CF high availability and non-disruptive online upgrades. The typical Pivotal CF deployment for lab and test environments uses a single internal instance of HAProxy. Production environments should use a highly available and customer-provided load-balancing solution for forwarding application traffic to the Pivotal CF Elastic Runtime router IP address.
Virtual SAN is a software-based distributed storage solution that is built into the ESXi hypervisor. It is preconfigured and managed through VMware vCenter Server to provide storage capacity across all VxRail Appliance nodes.
It uses the concept of disk groups to pool together locally attached flash devices and magnetic disks as management constructs. Disk groups are composed of at least one flash device and several magnetic disks.
The flash devices are used as read cache and write buffer in front of the magnetic disks to optimize virtual machine and application performance. The Virtual SAN datastore aggregates the disk groups across all hosts in the Virtual SAN cluster to form a single shared datastore for all hosts in the cluster.
Figure 2 depicts the data storage architecture of the solution.
Load balancing and high availability
VMware Virtual SAN
Solution architecture
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Figure 2. Data storage architecture
Pivotal CF relies on external DNS service for its application name resolution. The DNS service must be provided through an existing customer DNS server. An existing customer DNS server must be configured with at least one wildcard DNS domain to facilitate the publishing to and access of the application hosted by Pivotal CF. For production deployments, Pivotal recommends using two wildcard domains if the system and applications must be separated.
Pivotal CF relies on accessing external websites to download components that are required in buildpacks, which are used to compile applications that are pushed to Pivotal CF. In cases where external access is not possible from the Pivotal CF network to external websites, offline or custom buildpacks must be used. Refer to Custom Buildpacks for more information.
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting and Pivotal CF JMX Bridge help you analyze health, configurations, and capacity growth. You can quickly spot service-level agreement (SLA) problems through custom dashboards and reports that meet the needs of a wide range of users and roles. With Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting, you can also see capacity consumption across your Pivotal CF deployment. There are built-in views to help you understand who is using storage and compute capacity, how much they are using, and when more is required.
DNS considerations
External internet access
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and reporting
Solution architecture
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Pivotal CF Metrics uses the Pivotal CF JMX Bridge for Elastic Runtime to help you monitor installation and assist in troubleshooting. Pivotal CF Metrics collects and exposes system data from Pivotal CF components via a JMX Bridge endpoint.
JMX Collector is used to collect raw values from JMX-enabled applications, such as Pivotal CF Metrics. JMX Collector generates raw values and properties from Managed Bean (MBean) attribute values and uses typical expressions to transform values that are obtained from attributes and operations.
Stream Collector is a generic module for Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting that allows data to be imported from various text-based sources (command line output, text file, and so on) and pushed into Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting. Stream Collector relies on a parsing library that is provided by Dell EMC, and it can be configured to run the parsing task in a specific way. Stream Collector is used to retrieve absolute values for the Pivotal CF virtual machines’ memory, virtual CPUs, and ephemeral and persistent disks.
The Generic Host SolutionPack discovers and monitors physical and virtual servers and provides a global view of hosts in a data center. This SolutionPack provides the ability to report on, create alerts for, and analyze the host, capacity utilization, and performance measurements.
Figure 3 depicts the Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting architecture.
Solution architecture
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Figure 3. Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting architecture
Loggregator, the Pivotal CF component responsible for logging, provides a stream of log output from your applications and from Pivotal CF system components that interact with your applications during updates and execution.
When requested, Loggregator can stream logs to your terminal. To retain more than the limited amount of logging information that Loggregator can buffer, Native Hybrid Cloud uses the ELK Stack to collect, analyze, and display logs for management and operational analysis.
Elasticsearch is an open source search server that is based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with a RESTful web interface and schema-free JSON documents. The number of Elasticsearch servers is based on performance and scale evaluations performed by Dell EMC. These nodes house the search service and its indexes and databases.
Logstash is an open-source tool for receiving, processing, and outputting logs, and it creates a powerful pipeline for log storage, query, and analysis. Logstash is run on a Monitoring and Reporting node inside a container.
Kibana is an open-source data-visualization plug-in for Elasticsearch. It provides visualization capabilities on top of the log content that is indexed on an Elasticsearch cluster. Users can create bar, line, and scatter plots, pie charts, and maps of large
Logging
Solution architecture
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volumes of logs. The logs that are visualized in Kibana are presented to the user in a Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting external report.
Pivotal CF and VMware Virtual SAN provide Native Hybrid Cloud’s data protection capabilities, including backup and restoration and virtual machine cloning.
Backup and recovery of Pivotal Cloud Foundry Pivotal Operations Manager offers the ability to export the current Pivotal CF installation settings and assets. When you export an installation, the exported file contains the base virtual machine images, installed packages, and references to the installation IP addresses.
The Pivotal backup procedure includes steps for backing up critical databases, such as CloudController, UAA, MySQL, and Apps Manager databases. Refer to Backing Up Pivotal Cloud Foundry for more information. Dell EMC Professional Services or an expert administrator can perform this procedure.
Backup and recovery of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry WebDAV server contents The Pivotal CF WebDAV Server contents are backed up at a customer-specified interval, which is typically once daily. The automated process includes:
• Backing up the WebDAV Server contents to the Native Hybrid Cloud Installer virtual machine
• Taking a full VMware clone of the Native Hybrid Cloud Installer virtual machine to ensure a persistent copy of the backup data
The backup scheduler retains the last three good backups of the WebDAV Server contents.
Note: Native Hybrid Cloud retains the last three copies of the WebDAV Server contents backup. Only the last Native Hybrid Cloud Installer and Monitoring and Reporting virtual machine backups are retained.
The Native Hybrid Cloud Installer virtual machine is protected by creating full vSphere clones at a customer-specified interval, which is typically once daily. These virtual machine clone templates are stored in a datastore location that you specify during the Native Hybrid Cloud installation.
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting is composed of a virtual machine and its associated Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) files. Daily backups and full virtual machine clones ensure the backup of all required files to restore the Monitoring and Reporting virtual machine in case of loss or failure.
Native Hybrid Cloud creates a backup schedule for the Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting virtual machine. The typical backup interval, which an administrator can modify, is 24 hours. This interval preserves the historical data that is collected by Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting.
Data protection
Native Hybrid Cloud Installer virtual machine protection
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting virtual machine protection
Solution architecture key components
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Solution architecture key components This section briefly describes the key components that are used in Native Hybrid Cloud, as shown in Figure 4, and which include:
• Pivotal CF is an industry standard, open-source based, and cloud native application platform, which developers can use to build, deploy, run, and scale applications on public and private clouds.
• Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting is resource management software that enables IT professionals to:
Visualize usage relationships
Analyze and report on capacity, performance, and health
Optimize resource consumption
• VxRail Appliance, a platform for cloud computing. The elastic, scale-out, and hyper-converged design of VxRail Appliance can concurrently host multiple services.
Figure 4. Solution architecture key components
Native Hybrid Cloud technology overview Native Hybrid Cloud uses a variety of components to create a comprehensive application development environment, including Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting, VxRail Appliance, and VMware vSphere.
Pivotal CF is a cloud native platform (CNP) on which developers can build, deploy, run, and scale applications on public and private clouds. Pivotal CF enables developers to code in multiple languages and frameworks.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Native Hybrid Cloud technology overview
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Pivotal CF supplies developers with a ready-to-use cloud computing environment and application development services, all hosted by virtualized servers on VxRail Appliance infrastructure.
Pivotal Operations Manager is a web application that you use to deploy and manage Pivotal CF. It is the industry’s first turn-key enterprise CNP management platform with Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) integration.
Pivotal CF Metrics is a suite of products that are designed to help operators and developers better understand the health and performance of the Pivotal CF platform and all apps running on it. It includes Java Management Extensions (JMX) Bridge for Elastic Runtime. Pivotal CF Metrics collects and exposes system data from Pivotal CF components via a JMX endpoint to help you monitor your installation and assist in troubleshooting.
Elastic Runtime is the framework that hosts running applications, manages system health, and provides the API endpoint and cloud controller for the virtual machines provisioned by Pivotal Operations Manager.
Buildpacks provide framework and runtime support for your applications. Buildpacks typically examine user-provided artifacts to determine what dependencies to download and provide instructions on how to configure applications to communicate with bound services.
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting is storage resource management software that enables IT to visualize storage relationships, analyze and report on storage capacity, performance, and health, and optimize resources in traditional and software-defined environments.
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting is an embedded software technology that is common across EMC ViPR™, ViPR SRM, and EMC Service Assurance Suite. By using common technology, Dell EMC provides customers with a consistent look, feel, and experience as they use these products together to manage their data center. The common technology also simplifies deployment, ongoing maintenance, and resource utilization.
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting is more than just the base installation. Organizations can take advantage of plugins, extensions, and management packs to add functionality to management tools already deployed in data centers. For example, the JMX Monitoring and Reporting SolutionPack that is delivered with Native Hybrid Cloud enables administrators to get a complete and in-depth picture of the health, capacity, and availability of Pivotal CF. The Generic Host SolutionPack provides custom component monitoring.
The deployment prerequisite check list is designed to collect necessary customer site-specific information and prepare for Native Hybrid Cloud deployment. This list includes external networking information such as Domain Name System (DNS) and Network Time Protocol (NTP) server addresses, external load balancer information, the size of the planned Pivotal CF deployment, and external identity provider (IDP) information such as Active Directory endpoints and accounts.
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting
SolutionPacks for monitoring and reporting
Deployment prerequisite check list
Native Hybrid Cloud technology overview
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Dell EMC has developed a set of manual and automated tools to simplify the deployment of Native Hybrid Cloud on VxRail Appliance. Dell EMC Professional Services deploys the Native Hybrid Cloud Installer virtual machine and it is used to run automated tasks that:
• Validate the prerequisite checklist with previously collected customer site-related data (network, DNS, SSO, and so on) and create a YAML configuration file
• Run automated scripts that deploy the following prerequisite components:
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting with JMX and REST API collectors for Pivotal CF Metrics
Generic Host SolutionPack for monitoring Native Hybrid Cloud virtual machines
Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK) Stack for log collection and analysis
• Run automated post-installation scripts to create an initial backup of Native Hybrid Cloud components and collect as-built information for hand-off to Dell EMC Support
• Configure scheduled backups of the following after installation is complete:
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting virtual machine
Pivotal CF WebDAV Server virtual machine datastore contents
Native Hybrid Cloud automated deployment
VxRail Appliance technology overview
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VxRail Appliance technology overview VxRail Appliance, the hyper-converged infrastructure appliance from Dell EMC and VMware, is the easiest and fastest way to stand up a fully virtualized software-defined data center (SDDC) environment. With the power of a storage area network (SAN) in two rack units, VxRail Appliance provides a simple and cost-effective hyper-converged solution that delivers compute, network, storage, virtualization, and management for a wide variety of applications and workloads.
Built on the foundation of VMware hypervisor software and managed through the VMware vCenter Client and VxRail Manager, VxRail Appliance provides existing VMware customers with a familiar experience. Seamless integration with existing VMware applications, such as VMware vRealize Operations, lets customers use and extend their existing IT tools and processes.
VxRail Appliance is a proven building block of the SDDC and delivers up to five times the performance of other hyper-converged appliances. The appliance-based design allows IT centers to scale capacity and performance non-disruptively, so they can start small and grow incrementally with minimal up-front planning.
VxRail Appliance configurations can start with as few as 200 virtual machines and scale to thousands. The VxRail Appliance architecture enables a predictable pay-as-you-grow approach that aligns to changing business goals and user demand.
The VxRail Appliance is built using a distributed system architecture consisting of modular blocks (a 2U appliance with four nodes) that scales linearly from one to 16 appliances, for a maximum of 64 nodes in a cluster. In addition, different options are available for compute, memory, and storage configurations to match any use case.
Single-node scaling and a low-cost entry point enables customers to procure the right amount of storage and compute for today’s requirements and tomorrow’s growth. Additionally, all-flash models deliver the industry’s most powerful HCI to maximize performance and scale for applications that demand low latency. Figure 5 shows the VxRail Appliance basic building block: a four-node appliance with storage in front and compute in the back.
VxRail Appliance hardware architecture
VxRail Appliance technology overview
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Figure 5. VxRail Appliance basic building block
The VxRail Appliance is assembled as a complete solution by Dell EMC with proven server-node hardware that has been integrated, tested, and validated. The current generation of VxRail Appliance nodes uses Haswell-based Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors. The Intel Xeon E5 processor family is a multi-threaded, multi-core CPU designed to handle diverse workloads for cloud services, high-performance computing, and networking. The number of cores and memory capacity differ for each VxRail Appliance model.
VxRail Manager provides a software stack for SDDC building blocks including compute, network, storage, and management. VxRail Manager streamlines VxRail Appliance management for easier ongoing operations. VxRail Manager also provides integration for Dell EMC services and support to help you get the most out of your VxRail Appliance.
With VxRail Manager, you can:
• Monitor system health with deep hardware intelligence and graphical representation
• View appliance software versions and updates
• Access Dell EMC Online Support and eServices
• Access community resources such as the user forum and knowledgebase
• Use VxRail Market to access qualified Dell EMC software products
VxRail Appliance nodes
VxRail Manager
Installation and configuration
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Installation and configuration Dell EMC Professional Services installs all the Native Hybrid Cloud software, including Pivotal CF and Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting. Native Hybrid Cloud requires VxRail Appliance, and Dell EMC Professional Services performs the hardware installation.
Dell EMC Professional Services works with customers to configure compute, networking, and storage for Native Hybrid Cloud, along with the backup, recovery, and high-availability features for Native Hybrid Cloud and VxRail Appliance.
Customer support You can get Dell EMC support, product, and licensing information as follows.
Product information For documentation, release notes, software updates, or information about Dell EMC products, go to EMC Online Support.
Technical support Go to EMC Online Support and click Service Center to access options for contacting Dell EMC Technical Support. Contact your Dell EMC sales representative for details about obtaining a valid support agreement to open service requests or with questions about your account.
Upgrading Native Hybrid Cloud Dell EMC Professional Services performs all Native Hybrid Cloud upgrades.
Conclusion
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Conclusion Reducing IT operational expenditures while simultaneously increasing the reliability and capability of application production environments is a top priority for many businesses. Cost, stability, visibility, and ease of use are often key considerations when an enterprise evaluates new technology solutions.
The Native Hybrid Cloud solution with VxRail Appliance and Pivotal CF provides a flexible application production environment that can economically scale based on a business’s needs. Using Native Hybrid Cloud enables IT organizations to meet or exceed their goals to save money and maintain dependable service with an easily managed application production system. With Native Hybrid Cloud, customers realize the following benefits:
• Decreased costs that are associated with environment scalability
• Greater flexibility in cloud migration
• Rapid provisioning and application deployment and management
• Faster time to market for software applications
• Improved application quality through cloud-based quality-assurance services
• Integrated support for agile software-development practices, and integration with developer eco-systems
• Failure detection and health remediation in addition to monitoring, logs, and metrics
• Single point of contact for support issues
References
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References Access to these documents depends on your login credentials. If you do not have access to a document, contact your Dell EMC representative.
The following document, available at EMC.com, provides additional information:
• Native Hybrid Cloud, vSphere Edition with VxRail Solution Guide 1.2.1 The following documents and web pages, available at EMC Online Support, EMC.com, and VMware.com provide additional information:
• VCE VxRail Appliance 3.5 Release Notes
• VCE VxRail Appliance 3.5 Product Guide
• VxRail Appliance 4.0 Release Notes
• VxRail Appliance 4.0 Administration Guide
• Dell EMC VxRail Appliance: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance from Dell EMC and VMware
• VMware Virtual SAN
• VxRail Appliance Documentation The following Pivotal CF web pages, available at Pivotal.io, provide additional information:
• Pivotal Cloud Foundry Documentation Table of Contents
• Using Operations Manager
• Operator's Guide
• Administering and Operating Cloud Foundry
• Using the Apps Manager
• Buildpacks
• Preparing Your Firewall for Deploying Pivotal Cloud Foundry
• Custom Buildpacks
• Backing Up Pivotal Cloud Foundry The following documents, available at EMC Community Network or EMC Online Support, provide additional information about the EMC Storage Resource Management Suite (SRM), the basis for Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting:
• EMC ViPR SRM Administrator's Guide
• EMC ViPR SRM v3.7 Product Documentation Index
• ViPR SRM 3.7 - SolutionPack Metrics and Reports Matrix
• Storage Resource Management Suite
• Storage Resource Management Fundamentals e-Learning
Native Hybrid Cloud documentation
VxRail Appliance documentation
Pivotal Cloud Foundry documentation
Native Hybrid Cloud Monitoring and Reporting documentation