Reference Architecture for VMware vSphere 4 in PowerEdge, VDX and More

Designed for customers seeking to build a high-performance VM dense environment, this reference architecture was created for highly available configurations based on market-leading Dell™ blade servers, Dell Compellent™ storage, Brocade® networking and the VMware™ vSphere™ 4 hypervisor, with VMware vCenter Server and Dell Enterprise Manager for management tasks.

Key benefits of the reference architecture are:

• Minimized risk associated with multivendor solutions
• Scalable to accommodate growth and your changing storage and compute needs
• Reliable infrastructure that is designed with built-in redundancies and failover that creates a highly available environment to facilitate superior service-level agreement (SLA) delivery
• Shortened deployment time, which supports rapid return on investment (ROI)

Our virtualization, server and storage engineering teams, along with Brocade engineers, created and tested the architecture to ensure there are no infrastructure, interoperability or integration issues.

Design Components

Key components of the Reference Architecture include:

• Dell PowerEdge™ Blade Servers

  • 11th generation M710HD blade server

    • Intel® Xeon® 5500/5600 processors
    • Intel QuickPath memory technology
    • Dell Unified Server Configurator
  • Flex address
  • CMC and iKVM for enclosure management
• Dell Compellent Storage Center™
  • Fluid data architecture with thin provisioning and automated tiered storage
  • Centralized management using Enterprise Manager
  • Fast Track dynamic data placement software
• Brocade VDX Switches
  • Brocade VCS technology
  • Transparent interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL)
  • Converged fabric with Data Center Bridging (DCB)
• Brocade 5100 Fibre Channel Switches
  • IU 40 port high density switch
  • 1, 2, 4 and 8 Gbps fibre channel
• VMware vSphere 4
  • vMotion™
  • VMware HA, DRS and DPM
  • VMware vSphere Distributed Virtual Switch