vStart 50 Hyper-V Solution Overview Release 2.0 for Dell 12th generation servers Dell Global Solutions Engineering Revision: A00 Sep 2012 Dell Inc.
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vStart 50 Solution Overview Table of Contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1 2 Audience............................................................................................................... 1 3 Solution Overview ................................................................................................... 2 3.1 Storage Expansion Options ..........................................................
1 Introduction The vStart solution is a virtualization infrastructure solution that is designed and validated by Dell Engineering. It is delivered racked, cabled, and ready to be integrated into your datacenter. vStart is offered as four configurations: vStart 50, 100, 200 and 10001.
vStart 50 Solution Overview 3 Solution Overview The solution discussed in this whitepaper is powered by Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell EqualLogic iSCSI storage, Dell PowerConnect networking, and Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Edition with Hyper-V role enabled. The solution implements Dell and Microsoft best practices. EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters (SAN HQ) and Group Manager are included in the solution for storage array management and monitoring.
vStart 50 Solution Overview Table 1 provides descriptions for the solution components. Table 1.
vStart 50 Solution Overview 3.2 Product Overview This section provides an overview of the components in the solution. 3.2.1 PowerEdge R620 for Hypervisor Cluster The Dell PowerEdge R620 uses Intel® Xeon® E5 2600 series processors and Intel chipset architecture in a 1U rack mount form factor. The PowerEdge R620 supports up to ten 2.5” drives. There is also an option for an LCD on the front of the server for system health monitoring, alerting, and basic management configuration.
vStart 50 Solution Overview 3.2.3 Optional PowerEdge R420 for management server The Dell PowerEdge R420 uses Intel® Xeon® E5 2400 series processors and Intel chipset architecture in a 1U rack mount form factor. The PowerEdge R420 server supports up to eight 2.5” drives. The internal RAID controllers supported are PERC models H310, H710, and H710P. The server features two sockets and 12 memory DIMM slots supporting 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32GB DIMMs, up to a total of 192GB of memory.
vStart 50 Solution Overview 4 Delivery Model The solution is racked, cabled, and delivered to the customer site, ready for deployment 3. Dell Services deploys and configures the solution tailored to the business needs of the customer, The final turn-key virtualization infrastructure solution is available for customer use. For more details or questions about the delivery model, consult with your Dell Sales representative.
vStart 50 Solution Overview 5 Design Principles and Solution Capabilities This section covers the design principles, requirements, and solution capabilities behind the vStart solution architecture. 5.1 No Single Point of Failure The solution is designed such that there is no single point of failure and redundancy is incorporated into all mission critical components of the solution.
vStart 50 Solution Overview Table 3.
vStart 50 Solution Overview 5.5.1 Thin Provisioning The solution enables support for thin provisioning of storage at the EqualLogic level. Thin provisioning avoids the inefficiencies of over allocation. This is possible by limiting the physical storage resource allocation to what is currently used and enables the automatic addition of storage resources as requirements grow. 5.5.
vStart 50 Solution Overview Figure 3. Dell Inc.
vStart 50 Solution Overview 6.1 Performance Monitoring Performance monitoring and troubleshooting can often be difficult in a complex environment such as virtualized infrastructure. It is important to understand the tools used and the metrics measured to monitor the performance. For storage, SAN HQ provides an easy-to-use and intuitive tool for monitoring storage level performance.
vStart 50 Solution Overview 6.3 Out-of-band management Out-of-band (OOB) management is available for the PowerEdge R620 servers with the Hyper-V role enabled through the iDRAC7 Enterprise. The optional PowerEdge R420 management server uses the iDRAC7 Enterprise, which allows the PowerEdge R420 server to be remotely managed as needed.
