Release Notes

Direct from Development
Server and Infrastructure Engineering
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Dell EMC SmartFabric Services for
VMware ESXi on PowerEdge Servers
Non-SmartFabric Challenge
Manually configuring fabric for VMware ESXi clusters on PowerEdge
servers requires a great deal of administrative work for both onboarding
(day 1) and post-onboarding (day 2+) actions. This lack of autonomy
will translate to needing a network administrator to make tedious
adjustments for desired changes. There is a clear need for a more
effective, autonomous approach to deploying scalable fabrics capable
of supporting virtualized computing environments.
Two prominent resources are under-optimized when the manual
approach is used:
1. Time
a. Company man-hours are spent on IT trouble ticket
creation, idle waiting, and ticket management
b. Additional man-hours are required to service IT tickets
c. Coding errors made must be troubleshooted and corrected
d. There is a lengthy qualification process of networking OS
and server hardware with network switches
e. Any switch or ESXi end node failure results in manual
intervention by network team
2. Cost
a. Hiring a team of network administrators, which will scale as
the size of the data center scales (see Figure 1)
b. Inefficiency in the network can lead to decreased efficiency
in virtual workloads, causing financial under-optimization
Tech Note by
Matt Ogle
Jordan Wilson
Summary
The design, validation and
deployment process of
fabric across VMware ESXi
hosts is time-consuming
and unpredictable when
done manually.
This DfD will highlight what
SmartFabric technology is
and how it granted users
the agility required to
manage and scale ESXi
clusters effectively through
automation.
Figure 1 – Manually scaling this ESXi network would require
hundreds of lines of code by a team of network administrators