Dell EMC Ready Stack for Vmware Vsphere with Isilon and Unity XT Storage July 2020
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Dell EMC Ready Stack for VMware vSphere with Isilon and Unity XT Storage July 2020 H18118.1 Design Guide Abstract This design guide describes the architecture, design, configuration, and sizing of a converged infrastructure for VMware vSphere using Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, Isilon and Unity XT storage, and PowerSwitch S-Series switches. This guide also includes general deployment guidelines and best practices. Dell Technologies Solutions Copyright 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 © 2020 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell Technologies, Dell, EMC, Dell EMC and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Intel, the Intel logo, the Intel Inside logo and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks may be trademarks of their respective owners. Published in the USA 07/20 Design Guide H18118.1. Dell Inc. believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. 2 Dell EMC Ready Stack for VMware vSphere with Isilon and Unity XT Storage Design Guide Contents Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 4 Solution overview ..................................................................................................5 Document purpose ................................................................................................7 Audience ...............................................................................................................7 We value your feedback ........................................................................................7 Chapter 2 Ready Stack Architecture 8 Installation and configuration considerations ..........................................................9 Existing infrastructure requirements .......................................................................9 Ready Stack architecture overview .....................................................................10 Key components ................................................................................................. 10 Chapter 3 Configurations and Specifications 19 Recommended platforms and components ......................................................... 20 Design configuration ...........................................................................................21 Dell EMC Fabric Design Center ..........................................................................22 Chapter 4 Ready Stack Design 24 Compute design ..................................................................................................25 Network design ...................................................................................................25 Storage design ....................................................................................................28 Management design ............................................................................................ 32 Chapter 5 References 35 Dell EMC documentation.....................................................................................36 VMware documentation ......................................................................................37 Appendix A Deployment Considerations 38 Introduction .........................................................................................................39 General deployment guidelines ...........................................................................39 Planning for growth .............................................................................................40 Compute .............................................................................................................40 Networking ..........................................................................................................41 Storage ...............................................................................................................42 Additional considerations ....................................................................................43 Dell EMC Ready Stack for VMware vSphere with Isilon and Unity XT Storage 3 Design Guide Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 1 Introduction This chapter presents the following topics: Solution overview ...............................................................................................5 Document purpose .............................................................................................7 Audience ..............................................................................................................7 We value your feedback .....................................................................................7 4 Dell EMC Ready Stack for VMware vSphere with Isilon and Unity XT Storage Design Guide Chapter 1: Introduction Solution overview Due to more options and growing complexity, managing IT infrastructure in a data center is becoming increasingly difficult. Changing data center infrastructure that has evolved over time can significantly affect stability, performance, costs, and upgradability. Dell EMC Ready Stack solutions are proven, tested, and optimized to help organizations meet long-term data center needs for a variety of mixed workloads. This Ready Stack solution provides the simplicity of a complete, yet flexible, validated converged infrastructure (CI) that is based on the following components: • Dell EMC Isilon storage • Dell EMC Unity XT storage • Dell EMC PowerEdge servers • Dell EMC PowerSwitch S-Series switches • VMware vSphere virtualization platform This solution provides: • One trusted vendor for all CI stack components—compute, storage, networking, and data protection • Design and deployment guidance that incorporates validation, interoperability testing, and best practices • Design guidance that focuses on scale, flexibility, and high availability • A reference architecture that incorporates physical topology diagrams and general connectivity guidelines • Unified management and system monitoring through VMware vCenter The challenge: Unstructured data is growing at a far faster rate than that of traditional transactional-based managing storage. Unstructured data either has no predefined data model or no predefined manner unstructured of organization, or both. Anything that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet can be data thought of as unstructured data. Examples include videos, PDF files, social data, social media inputs, sensor inputs, and language data. Unstructured data can come from various sources: mobile/web applications; social media; logistical, tracking, and supply chain capture points; and the Internet of Things, such as smart sensors and intelligent devices. An organization's unstructured data might be scattered across numerous locations among various teams and suborganizations. Siloed data has limited usefulness because it cannot be used by all the departments and business units that could extract value from it. Adding Isilon storage to your traditional storage environment can help unlock the value of your unstructured data through better consolidation, optimization, organization, collaboration, and insight through business intelligence and analytics. The Isilon OneFS operating system provides the power and tools to consolidate, administer, and manage the growth of unstructured data efficiently so that it can be used prescriptively across your entire organization. This capability enables you to analyze the Dell EMC Ready Stack for VMware vSphere with Isilon and Unity XT Storage 5 Design Guide Chapter 1: Introduction data, unlocking value beyond the recording of an event or timestamp. Analysis can reveal patterns, trends, and associations that serve a business purpose, including targeted advertising, real-time analytics, business intelligence, predictive analytics, and performance monitoring. Solution benefits This Ready Stack provides the following key benefits: • Resiliency—The Ready Stack architecture ensures that no single point of failure exists. Redundancy is incorporated in the critical aspects of the Ready Stack, which includes server high-availability features, redundant networking, and multi-path storage. • Virtualization support—We designed this Ready Stack for general-purpose virtualized workloads. Each server is equipped with suitable processing power, memory, and connection options to support Ethernet or Fibre Channel (FC)- attached storage. Each server also supports multiple transport protocols for added deployment flexibility. Various integration points provide for advanced functionality and increased visibility of your end-to-end virtualized environment. • Scalability—You can configure this Ready Stack to suit your virtualized infrastructure needs. The Ready Stack supports flexibility in the form of various options, such as server model, number of compute servers, server processor model, server memory capacity, type of Isilon and Unity XT storage, and storage capacity. • Storage intelligence—Dell EMC Isilon scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) solutions combine three layers of traditional storage architectures—file system, volume manager, and data protection—into one unified software layer,