FlexPod for VMware sheds light on the future of IT

Shared infrastructure might be the future of IT, but for many of us, the best way to get there remains an open question. The process of integrating heterogeneous server, network, and storage components into a shared infrastructure with balanced performance and high efficiency and then enabling business-critical applications on top of that infrastructure comes with some serious potential pitfalls.

Cisco, NetApp, and VMware have created FlexPod for VMware—a presized, validated, standardized data center architecture design available through select channel partners—to address these difficulties. FlexPod provides a shared infrastructure built from best-in-class components designed to reduce risk, maximize data center efficiency, and enable you to provision new services or roll out new data center infrastructure quickly and easily. FlexPod is designed with flexibility in mind. You can easily scale up a single FlexPod configuration in any dimension or scale out with multiple identical FlexPod installations. FlexPod sizing and deployment processes are fully documented to further make sure of success.

FlexPod for VMware creates a shared infrastructure using leading hardware and software components from Cisco, NetApp, and VMware. The baseline FlexPod configuration is illustrated in Figure 1. All FlexPod components are designed to achieve maximum redundancy and high availability.

Figure 1)

FlexPod for VMware components (click to expand).

The NetApp FAS3210A storage system used by FlexPod is a dual-controller configuration that includes 42TB of SAS storage and 512GB of Flash Cache for intelligent caching that offers significant acceleration for server and desktop virtualization and other applications. The FAS3210A is able to achieve high levels of storage efficiency using proven NetApp technologies such as RAID-DP®, deduplication, thin provisioning, FlexClone®, and others.

On the compute side, FlexPod includes two types of compute blades: the B-Series B200 M2 Blade Server for general workloads and the B250 M2 Extended Memory Blade Server for memory-intensive workloads. The B250M2 offers more than double the memory capacity of a standard two-socket server design to meet the needs of demanding virtualization environments and large dataset applications. Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco® UCS) offers the highest density for virtualization computing, consolidated wiring, and unified fabric for networking simplicity.

For networking, Cisco Nexus® 5500 series switches provide a unified, high-speed fabric for connectivity. Figure 2 illustrates FlexPod connectivity in detail and shows that all network paths are redundant.

 

Figure 2)

FlexPod connectivity (click to expand).

The networking infrastructure deployed with the first FlexPod configuration provides ports and bandwidth to support up to three FlexPod installations. In other words, you can add two additional FlexPod installations to your infrastructure (for a total of three) before additional networking capacity is needed.

Two networking components are specifically designed to support VMware:

• Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual supervisor module (VSM) is a software switch that runs within the VMware kernel or on the Cisco Nexus 1010 appliance to provide tight integration between the server and network environment.
• Cisco Nexus 1010 is a dedicated appliance that supports multiple instances of the Cisco Nexus 1000V VSM to offload the work from individual server blades, improving scalability and performance.

 

Figure 3)

Cisco Nexus 1000V and Cisco Nexus 1010 (click to expand).

FlexPod for VMware includes VMware vSphere™ Enterprise Plus and VMware vCenter™. VMware is the leading server virtualization technology and includes capabilities such as VMotion™, Storage VMotion, and Distributed Resource Scheduler. For those that already have a VMware Enterprise license, FlexPod is available without the VMware software components.

 For element management, FlexPod for VMware includes three components:

• VMware vCenter provides a scalable and extensible management platform that supports workflow automation.
• Cisco UCS Manager provides embedded management of Cisco components and integration with vCenter.
• NetApp OnCommand Management Suite lets you delegate storage management tasks to server or VMware admins and also provides vCenter integration.

Many data centers either have standardized on a system management stack or are planning on doing so. To facilitate integration into existing management frameworks, each layer in the FlexPod for VMware solution stack—hypervisor, network, compute, storage—provides open APIs for integration with leading orchestration products from BMC, CA, DynamicOps, HP, IBM, newScale, VMware, and others.