Dell EMC VxRail and VMware vSphere
TA4V is based on VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) hardware from Dell EMC. A hyper-converged solution is made up of servers, network switches and management software to create a complete set of data center resources in a single, collapsed system. There is no need to separate storage systems from network systems from compute systems. The VxRail solution includes tools to organize servers into clusters of virtualized compute capacity, establish and format a shared storage target from individual drives in servers and align the networking ports to the needed jobs, all through automation.
Further, VxRail establishes a lifecycle management system to keep the clusters hardware patched, current with VMware releases through further automation.
Overall, the purview of VxRail HCI System Software is to take servers in a raw state and deliver a fully paved vSphere installation, complete with vCenter Server management cluster(s), vSAN shared storage and related constructs.
VMware NSX-T Data Center Software Defined Networking
Virtualized, software-defined networking is a core concept leveraged by the TA4V solution. This important infrastructure layer brings maximum flexibility and growth potential to TA4V. You can transform a small system into a large system without having to rebuild the entire platform.
NSX-T Data Center brings many important capabilities to the platform. For example, you will benefit from:
- Tunneled networks of near-infinite capacity for Orgs, Namespaces and Apps to use
- Bridged interfaces to the datacenter network core that can be expanded and clustered for speed, capacity and redundancy
- Routing interfaces that are defined and deployed logically for a variety of needs to meet Org, Namespace and App needs, including routing directly to application containers
- Load balancing logical instances for Apps and Namespaces on-demand
The Enterprise PKS software has native support for NSX-T Data Center built into the product and requires an NSX-T Data Center installation to be completed prior to use. TAS for VMs software is also compatible with NSX-T Data Center but does not strictly require its presence.
Architecture Review
The overall architecture of TA4V is as follows (bottom up view):
- A VxRail HCI cluster, or series of clusters, are organized using VxRail Manager
- vSphere is paved into cluster(s) via VxRail Manager
- A vSAN shared storage target in every cluster is created from local disks of every server in the cluster
- NSX-T Data Center is layered on and a routed interface to the datacenter is established
- The container platform of choice is layered onto the compute cluster(s) and interfaced with NSX-T Data Center for dynamic deployment of networks, routers and load balancers
All of these components work together to establish a horizontally-scalable (via adding hosts to a cluster) and vertically-scalable (via adding memory/disk/network to cluster hosts) container-ready system that is self-contained and self-healing.
