Reference Architecture: vSphere 4, Rack Servers, 10 GbE iSCSI Boot

Get up and running quickly with this detailed reference architecture for Business-Ready Configurations based on:

• VMware® vSphere™ 4 ESXi
• Dell™ PowerEdge™ R610 and R810 rack servers
• Dell EqualLogic™ PS6010X iSCSI storage arrays
• Dell PowerConnect™ 8024F 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switches

You can quickly and confidently deploy these engineering-proven architectures into production environments, which helps eliminate costly and time-consuming trial and error. This solution provides scalability and manageability with no single point of failure. Network architectures, storage configurations and best practices for deploying and configuring vSphere are discussed in detail.

The configurations in this paper make use of boot from Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) technology to boot ESXi hypervisors from boot volumes on EqualLogic arrays onto PowerEdge R810 servers. There are several benefits to using hypervisors from boot volumes instead of local drives:

• Server deployment and replacement are made easier as the hypervisor image is not tied to the physical server and can be redeployed to a new server seamlessly.
• Diskless servers reduce deployment and maintenance cost over the life of the configuration.
• SAN-based backup and restore procedures make it easier to back up hypervisor images and also improve disaster recovery scenarios over localized images.
• Since all images are hosted on the same SAN, their creation and management are also made easier.
• The high-availability features of a SAN improve hypervisor availability by removing a single point of failure at the local disk of a server.

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.