Organizations and industries can leverage SDDC technologies to convert ideas into services faster and thereby maintain or even improve market competitiveness with rapid innovation. Enterprises are capable of achieving an effective cloud operating model on premises by adopting a proven, software-defined data center stack in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and extending it to the public cloud when needed for certain workloads. VCF provides organizations with a reliable platform for deploying virtual machine-based workloads.
There are a few challenges to address when deploying infrastructure and applications in a mission-critical environment involving VMware VCF platform.
- Infrastructure management complexity: Management of infrastructure components frequently requires multiple tools, which adds to complexity. In addition, firmware updates and upgrades in Day 2 scenarios also must be managed.
- Overprovisioned infrastructure and provisioning time: To meet long term needs, often the current infrastructure is overprovisioned, thus adding to both CapEx and OpEx costs.
- Security: Enterprise IT shops must provide protection against threats and ensure compliance.
- High availability: Enterprise IT shops must provision for state-of-art high availability practices.
HPE Reference Architecture for VMware Cloud Foundation on HPE Synergy addresses these challenges and provides a solution around infrastructure provisioning, manageability, scalability, security, and high availability. It encompasses Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 requirements.
HPE Synergy composable infrastructure enables optimized infrastructure deployment and simplifies manageability using HPE OneView. VMware SDDC manager makes seamless manageability possible when used with HPE Synergy and HPE OneView. In addition, customers can leverage HPE Primera, HPE 3PAR StoreServ, or HPE Nimble Storage as the principal and ancillary storage platform for their business-driven goals.
Below are the key highlights of the solution:
- Faster time-to-value with fluid resource pools and software-defined intelligence of HPE Synergy, allowing administrators to rapidly compose any configuration required.
This capability reduces deployment time from days down to hours.
- Ability to efficiently scale storage and compute independently, and to deploy SDDC environments.
The solution provides grow-as-you-go and support for both traditional virtual machines and cloud-native applications.
- Agility to expand and contract physical and virtual infrastructure on-demand to meet changing business requirements with HPE OneView connector (developed and maintained by HPE and powered by DMTF Redfish APIs).
Unique Integration between VMware SDDC manager and HPE Synergy Composer provides a single console to dynamically compose software-defined and physical infrastructure.
- Automation of complex IT tasks in an extensible and repeatable manner.
A predefined collection of HPE tasks and workflows can be used in vRealize Orchestrator (VRO) with easy-to-use, drag and drop access to automation of HPE OneView managed hardware deployment, firmware updates, and other life-cycle tasks. These help customers customize any workflow in the collection to meet the needs of data center operations. HPE OneView for VMware vRealize Orchestrator allows the advanced management features of HPE OneView to be incorporated into larger IT workflows. HPE OneView workflows and actions can also be integrated into VMware vRealize Automation via vRealize Orchestrator.
- Integrated monitoring and reporting for the VCF environment using HPE OneView for VMware vRealize Operation’s custom dashboards.
HPE OneView for VMware vRealize Operations provides integrated and highly automated performance, capacity, configuration compliance, and cost management tools to the vRealize Operations custom GUI. The plugin seamlessly integrates the manageability features of HPE Synergy with VMware analytics engine to analyze what is normal and then apply that baseline to a dynamic server environment.
- Applications delivery through vRealize Automation Blueprints
This feature includes security tied in with NSX, including micro-segmentation to provide dynamic isolation between different tiers of the application and edge-services such as load balancing of the web tier.
- An easy-to-operate VI (Virtual Infrastructure) traditional data center in a VCF workload domain.
- Guidance to attach and configure HPE Primera, HPE 3PAR StoreServ, and HPE Nimble Storage to use as principal as well as ancillary storage for VCF VI workload.
- Guidance for VMware Enterprise PKS as a cloud-native platform on VCF NSX-T workload domain on HPE Synergy.
- Guidance for offline VMware Cloud Foundation update for HPE Synergy.
- Guidance for high availability of VCF Management domain using VMware vSAN Stretched cluster.
- Guidance for deployment of VMware Enterprise PKS as a cloud-native platform on a VCF NSX-T Workload domain
- Guidance for deployment of Consolidated Architecture of VCF
The reference architecture shows how to deploy VCF at scale using HPE’s solution processes and automation. This solution demonstrates deploying two HPE Synergy 12000 frames--each equipped with eight HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 servers and an HPE Synergy D3940 Module. Each HPE Synergy 12000 frame uses HPE VC SE 100Gb F8 Module as a fabric module to provide an uplink to the data center network. Sixteen HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 servers are used to configure one VCF management domain and three VCF workload domains. The HPE Synergy Storage Module D3940 hosts software-defined VMware vSAN storage. HPE Primera, HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage, or HPE Nimble Storage provides primary storage as well as ancillary storage for the VI workload domains.
In summary, HPE Reference Architecture for VMware Cloud Foundation on HPE Synergy addresses key requirements of infrastructure manageability, provisioning, scalability, security, and high availability.
You can refer to the Reference Architectures and Reference Configurations at www.hpe.com/info/ra. In addition, you can engage HPE Pointnext for getting access to Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 code-based automation-related services. Please contact your HPE representative for further details.
Mandar Chitale, Master Program Manager
About the author:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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