Post sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Let me start with some questions for you: Are you considering deploying VMware Cloud Foundation and want an automated code-based deployment?
Are you interested in automating Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 activities? Are you ready to automate provisioning of enterprise grade ancillary storage? Do you want to optimally deploy infrastructure and simplify infrastructure manageability?
HPE has the answers—with a solution for deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on HPE Synergy with vSAN with HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble as ancillary storage.
Businesses today are faced with challenges to turn ideas into services faster, respond quickly to new customer demands, and innovate to stay competitive. To meet these demands, enterprises are embracing a journey to digital transformation and the software-defined data center (SDDC). You are increasingly adopting new cloud technologies based on software-defined model and running virtual machines (VMs) in the public cloud while keeping workloads on-prem. VMware Cloud Foundation provides you with a reliable platform for deploying VM-based workloads
You will need to address some challenges when deploying infrastructure and applications in a mission-critical environment involving VMware VCF platform. These include:
- Overprovisioned infrastructure and provisioning time—To meet long term needs, often the current infrastructure is overprovisioned, thus adding to both CapEx and OpEx costs.
- Infrastructure management complexity—Management of infrastructure components frequently requires multiple tools which adds complexity.
- Security—Enterprise IT shops must provide protection against threats and ensure compliance.
- High availability—Enterprise IT shops must provision for state-of-the-art high availability practices
The HPE Reference Architecture for VMware Cloud Foundation on HPE Synergy addresses these challenges and provides solution around infrastructure provisioning, manageability, scalability, security, and high availability.
HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure enables optimized infrastructure deployment and simplifies manageability using HPE OneView. Seamless manageability is a result when used in conjunction with VMware SDDC. In addition, when using HPE 3PAR or HPE Nimble Storage, you can leverage a business-driven ancillary storage platform.
Solution highlights
- The fluid resource pools and software-defined intelligence of HPE Synergy allow administrators to rapidly compose any configuration required, reducing deployment time from days down to hours. This provides faster time-to-value.
- Agility to expand and contract physical and virtual infrastructure on-demand to meet changing business requirements with HPE OneView connector. Unique integration between VMware SDDC manager and HPE Synergy Composer provides a single console to dynamically compose software- defined and physical infrastructure.
- Predefined collection of HPE tasks and workflows that 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. 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 in VMware vRealize Automation via vRealize Orchestrator.
- Efficient monitoring for 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 that analyzes what is normal and then applies that baseline to a dynamic server environment.
- Applications delivery through vRealize Automation Blueprints which include 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.
- Ability to efficiently scale storage and compute independently, to deploy SDDC environments. Grow-as-you-go and support both traditional virtual machines and cloud-native applications.
- An easy-to-operate VI (Virtual Infrastructure) traditional data center in a VCF workload domain.
- Guidance to attach and configure HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble Storage to use as ancillary storage to use 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 data protection using Veeam and HPE StoreOnc
The solution illustrates the functionality by deploying two (2) HPE Synergy 12000 frames each equipped with eight (8) HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 servers, and an HPE Synergy D3940 Module. Each HPE Synergy 12000 frame uses HPE VC SE 40Gb F8 Module as a fabric module to provide uplink to the data center network. Sixteen (16) HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 servers are used to configure one VCF management domain and three (3) VCF workload domains. The HPE Synergy Storage Module D3940 hosts software-defined VMware vSAN storage. HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage or HPE Nimble Storage provides the ancillary storage for the VI workload domains.
The reference architecture shows how to deploy VCF at scale using HPE’s solution processes and automation.
Learn more in the Reference Architecture
The HPE Reference Architecture for VMware Cloud Foundation on HPE Synergy shows how to deploy VCF at scale using HPE’s solution processes and automation. It addresses key requirements of infrastructure provisioning, manageability, scalability, security. and high availability.
You can also refer to the 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 automation related services.
Please contact your HPE representative for further details.
Meet Server Experts blogger Mandar Chitale, HPE Solution Engineering Team. Mandar has two decades of experience in the IT industry. Currently, he is a Program Manager with the HPE Solution Engineering Team which is focused on creating Solution Reference Architectures for enterprise use cases based on the traditional and emerging digital technology scape.
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