The Active System 800v, a Dell converged infrastructure: Process, Stakes and Opportunities
Let us learn more about this infrastructure with
the help of Andrew Coleman from Dell.
‘’Dell converged
infrastructure uses virtualization and converged traffic to enable a dynamic
datacenter environment. The Active
System 800v - the first Dell converged infrastructure solution - utilizes Datacenter
Bridging (DCB) to converge network and storage traffic into a single fabric.
With DCB and NPAR, this
converged traffic is then separated into four
partitions in the case of Active System 800v. All three applications recommend
VLANs for their management network, application network, and private
application clustering network. With DCB, these VLANs exist on one partition
for workload traffic, allowing for additional partitions for virtualization
failover traffic, hypervisor management traffic, and storage traffic.
SharePoint utilizes a
management network, a application communication network, and a private network
for SQL replication, requiring three total VLANs on one partition. Lync
requires a vlan for application communication and a private vlan for the F5
hardware load balancer. Exchange requires a public and a private vlan for its
database communication. Of course, all three applications will need a route to
the environment's domain controller and also paths to the end user clients that
consume the e-mail, instant message, and content provided by these
applications. Recently, Global Solutions Engineering updated The Reference
Architecture booklets for Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint to include recommendations for supporting up to
5000 users on a converged infrastructure solution such as Active System 800v*.
When using DCB, hardware iSCSI
with raw device mappings in VMware vSphere are recommended. With hardware iSCSI
and Raw Device Mappings (RDMs), the preferred method of high availability
depends upon each application. Lync uses SQL to store contacts and presence but
still functions without access to its database. Therefore, with Lync, the SQL
server uses VM high availability, requiring only one SQL server for its
deployment. SharePoint functionality depends upon access to its database, so
the solution recommends SQL mirroring with a primary SQL server that is
mirrored to a secondary SQL server and a SQL witness server for arbitration.
Exchange does not use a sql server, and instead utilizes its own database
management system for e-mails. Following Exchange architecture, the solution
suggests a database availability group of three virtual machines, each running
a standalone mailbox server role. More detail into how to create raw device
mappings will be provided in a later blog post. Overall, converged
infrastructure provides a dynamic datacenter environment that can host a highly
available installation of Exchange, Lync, or SharePoint.’’
*These
reference architectures are separated and are not validated to co-exist on the
same Active System, but can exist alongside other applications as long as
performance requirements are met.
