Reference Architecture: VMware vSphere 4, Blade Servers, Fibre Channel

Business Ready Configurations for Virtualization are preconfigured, easy-to-order, bundled solutions that include Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers, storage and networking combined with industry-leading hypervisors. This document provides a detailed reference architecture for VMware® vSphere™ 4 ESXi with Dell PowerEdge blade servers, Dell/EMC CX4 storage arrays, Brocade® Fibre Channel switches and PowerConnect™ network switches. Based on extensive engineering work in architectural design and certification, these engineering-proven architectures can be deployed into production environments, helping to eliminate much of the costly and time-consuming trial and error often encountered during complex infrastructure design and implementation. This solution provides scalability and manageability with no single point of failure. Network architectures, storage configurations and best practices necessary for deploying and configuring vSphere are discussed in detail.

The intended audiences for this white paper are IT administrators, IT managers and channel partners who are planning to deploy VMware virtualization using Dell PowerEdge M610 blade servers, Dell/EMC CX4 storage arrays and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) network environments.