HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure has a strong solution ecosystem. Technical marketing engineer Madhav Bharadwaj shares recent HCI solution updates and provides links to technical whitepapers, lab reports, and reference architectures that provide more details.
In alignment with the HPE strategy to give customers a seamless experience from edge to core to cloud, HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions add to the customer’s journey in fulfilling their business use cases and technical requirements.
The portfolio of solutions aids customers with a wide variety of use cases. From edge solutions like video monitoring (HPE SimpliVity is a Milestone verified platform) or container workloads, to core workloads like VDI and databases, to business continuity solutions like Veaam, CTERA and other application integrations, the HPE SimpliVity solution ecosystem has the bases covered.
Our team is constantly adding new solutions to the portfolio, and at the same time updating and validating the existing solutions to the latest and greatest versions. In this blog, I share our most recent updates for HPE SimpliVity solutions.
SAP HANA certification
We are glad to announce that the long pending SAP HANA certification for HPE SimpliVity with Intel Cascade Lake processors is now available. Two models have been certified:
- HPE SimpliVity 380 (hardware-accelerated model) certified with VMware vSphere 6.7 and HPE SimpliVity 4.0.1
- HPE SimpliVity 380G (software-optimized model) certified with VMware vSphere 6.7 and HPE SimpliVity 4.1.0
More details on the certification can be found in the SAP HANA Hardware directory. HPE solutions experts have published an SAP HANA on HPE SimpliVity best practice guide that provides sizing, installation, and deployment best practices for these hyperconverged models.
Citrix virtual apps on HPE SimpliVity 325
In addition to validations for Citrix VDI workloads on HPE SimpliVity 380 models, we now also have validated HPE SimpliVity 325. The specific tests performed and the number of desktops supported are approved by LoginVSI. The tests demonstrated linear scale-up and scale-out performance as the number of knowledge workers or desktops were increased. Even more impressive, the system was able to run close to 1600 desktops on a 4&4 configuration (4 DL325 compute nodes and 4 HPE SimpliVity 325 nodes).
The below table shows a summary of the test results.
As we see, VSI base for the environment was 572 ms, and VSI max was not reached in any run, indicating that the system consistently delivered a high-performance user experience with plenty of headroom left on the system. Latency was consistently low, confirming that the HPE SimpliVity 325 Gen10 infrastructure could easily handle the 1600 Knowledge Worker users in the hosted desktop configuration particular to this test. Most importantly, this test was performed using only four nodes of storage resources.
The benefits of running VDI workloads on HPE SimpliVity include storage efficiency, a built-in disaster recovery (DR) tool, the ability to start small with just 2 nodes and scale as required, and the ability to add compute nodes for more processing power. This validation also provides an option to run VDI workloads on rack-dense, cost-effective hardware for customers who are tight on both budget and space.
More details of the validation can be found in the HPE Reference Architecture for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops7, which includes the desktop configuration used, workloads configured on each desktop, and the LoginVSI benchmarking numbers.
Microsoft SQL Server 2019 on HPE SimpliVity
The validation for MS SQL Server 2019 on HPE SimpliVity is an update to the already existing MS SQL server 2017 solution. We see similar benefits to those in previous validations like HPE SimpliVity storage efficiency, use of HPE SimpliVity clone or backup functionality to make quick copies of production data, robust native DR capabilities, and also performance benefits such as linear scale-up and scale-out performance irrespective of the operating system the SQL database is hosted on.
Below graphs show the performance of the system for scale-up and scale-out scenarios, for the DB hosted on a Windows virtual machine. As the database size was increased to accommodate a greater number of requests, we saw a linear increase in the performance, and the system was able to scale up to accommodate the requests.
When the single node performance was saturated, we added extra nodes to accommodate the increasing number of requests. Again in this test, the performance was not impacted and the system scaled out as required.
For more details on this solution, check out the HPE Reference Architecture for Microsoft SQL Server 2019 on HPE SimpliVity 380 which talks about the various configurations used and validations performed.
CTERA on HPE SimpliVity
CTERA provides a global file system for customers who require distributed file access from edge to core to cloud. The validated plug-and-play solution works smoothly and efficiently on our HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged platforms. As part of the validation testing, we performed HPE SimpliVity operations like backup and clone on the CTERA VMs and adding large files to the CTERA file server. The system behaved and as expected, with an added benefit: HPE SimpliVity delivered superior dedupe ratios, thus helping customers benefit from not only a distributed file system but also from significant storage savings.
Google Cloud’s Anthos on HPE SimpliVity
This solution brings Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to an HPE SimpliVity environment. As a result, you can now develop and deploy applications rapidly and securely, either on-premises or in the cloud, through a consistent interface that allows you to optimize your resource utilization. Combining Anthos with HPE SimpliVity gives you an industry-leading platform to facilitate cloud-native development at internet speed, resulting in increased agility, reduced costs, simplified management, and security at scale.
Check out Anusha Y’s blog for a more thorough description of the HPE SimpliVity CSI plugin and supported platforms. The technical whitepaper on Google Cloud’s Anthos on HPE SimpliVity also provides more details.
Exploring new solutions
As I mentioned, HPE SimpliVity has a wide spectrum of solutions ranging from edge to core to cloud, enabling seamless user experience for a variety of use cases. Apart from the solutions I describe here, we are continually exploring new solutions that can help you solve your business requirements, mainly focusing on edge workloads. If you would like to see any solutions or use cases that are not part of our portfolio yet, do reach out to me. Our team will be happy to explore the possible integrations.
To learn more about the features and benefits of HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure, including hardware and software subsystems that make up the HCI solution:
- Visit our webpage at hpe.com/simplivity
- Check out our in-depth technical whitepaper on HPE SimpliVity for VMware vSphere
Meet HPE blogger Madhav Bharadwaj, Technical Marketing Engineer for the HPE SimpliVity HCI platform. Madhav is focused on enabling and building integrations and developing solutions to enhance the customer experience.
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