VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE VCE VXRAIL™ APPLIANCE Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance from EMC® and VMware® Document H15104 Version 1.0 April, 2016 © 2016 VCE COMPANY, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 1 VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE Copyright © 2016 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS PROVIDED ―AS IS.‖ EMC CORPORATION 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 EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. EMC2, EMC, VCE, and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United State and other countries. 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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 2 VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE Table of Contents Preface AUDIENCE ......................................................................................................................... 6 RELATED RESOURCES AND DOCUMENTATION ....................................................................... 6 CONTRIBUTORS ................................................................................................................. 7 CONVENTIONS ................................................................................................................... 7 Introduction DEPLOYMENT TREND TOWARDS CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE ............................................. 8 DESIGN TREND TOWARDS SDDCs ........................................................................................ 9 HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE ............................................................................... 10 VCE Converged Infrastructure Platforms Overview BLOCK ARCHITECTURE ..................................................................................................... 13 RACK ARCHITECTURE ....................................................................................................... 14 APPLIANCE ARCHITECTURE ............................................................................................... 14 VCE VXRAIL™APPLIANCE PRODUCT PROFILE ....................................................................... 15 VxRail Hardware Architecture VXRAIL APPLIANCE CLUSTER ............................................................................................. 17 VxRail Node ..................................................................................................................... 17 VxRail Node Storage Disk Drives ........................................................................................ 19 VXRAIL MODELS AND SPECIFICATIONS .............................................................................. 19 Scaling ........................................................................................................................... 20 VxRail Software Architecture APPLIANCE MANAGEMENT ................................................................................................. 23 VxRail Manager ................................................................................................................ 23 VxRail Manager Extension ................................................................................................. 23 VMWARE VSPHERE ........................................................................................................... 26 VMware vSphere vCenter Server ........................................................................................ 26 vCenter Server Services and Interfaces ................................................................................. 27 PSC Deployment Options ................................................................................................... 27 VMware vSphere ESXi ....................................................................................................... 28 ESXi Overview ................................................................................................................ 28 Communication between vCenter Server and ESXi Hosts ....................................................... 29 Virtual Machines ............................................................................................................... 30 © 2016 VCE COMPANY, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 3 VXRAIL CONCEPTS AND ARCHITECTURE Virtual Machine Hardware .................................................................................................. 31 Virtual Machine Communication .......................................................................................... 31 Virtual Networking ............................................................................................................ 31 Standard Virtual Switch .................................................................................................... 32 Virtual Distributed Switch .................................................................................................. 33 Migration and VMotion ...................................................................................................... 34 Enhanced vMotion Compatibility .......................................................................................... 35 Storage vMotion .............................................................................................................. 35 vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler ............................................................................. 36 vSphere High Availability (HA) ........................................................................................... 38 vCenter Server Watchdog .................................................................................................. 40 vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) ............................................................................................. 41 VIRTUAL SAN .................................................................................................................. 42 Disk Groups ..................................................................................................................... 43 Hybrid and All-Flash Differences ......................................................................................... 44 Read Cache: Basic Function ............................................................................................... 44 Write Cache: Basic Function ............................................................................................... 45 Flash Endurance ............................................................................................................... 45 Virtual SAN’s Impact on Flash Endurance ............................................................................... 45 Client Cache .................................................................................................................... 45 Objects and Components .................................................................................................. 46 Witness ........................................................................................................................ 46 Replicas ........................................................................................................................ 46 Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) .......................................................................... 47 Dynamic Policy Changes .................................................................................................... 47 Storage Policy Attributes ................................................................................................... 47 I/O Paths and Caching Algorithms ...................................................................................... 50 Read Caching ................................................................................................................. 50 Write Caching ................................................................................................................. 52 Distributed Caching Considerations ...................................................................................... 54 Virtual SAN High Availability and Fault Domains ................................................................... 55 Limitations of Two- and Three-Node Configurations .................................................................. 55 Fault Domain Overview ..................................................................................................... 56 Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster ............................................................................................ 57 Site Locality ................................................................................................................... 58 Networking .................................................................................................................... 59 Stretched-Cluster Heartbeats and Site Bias ............................................................................ 59 vSphere HA settings for Stretched Cluster ............................................................................