Dell EMC PowerStore, Integrating with VMware vSphere
A guest post by Marco Abela When we designed PowerStore, we wanted integrations with VMware to be in the DNA of the product, and boy have we delivered on that. […]
Dell Storage, PowerStore, PowerFlex PowerMax & PowerScale, Virtualization & Containers Technologies
A guest post by Marco Abela When we designed PowerStore, we wanted integrations with VMware to be in the DNA of the product, and boy have we delivered on that. […]
A guest post by Marco Abela
When we designed PowerStore, we wanted integrations with VMware to be in the DNA of the product, and boy have we delivered on that. In this blog post we will cover what’s new in regards to these integrations.
AppsON:
One of the most differentiated features of PowerStore is the AppsON capability available in PowerStore X models, where we load the ESXi hypervisor on each of the two internal PowerStore nodes to allow users to run Virtual Machines directly on PowerStore. You can get a detailed refresher of what AppsON is in this past blog post, but in summary PowerStore with AppsON is:
AppsON Use Cases
PowerStore with AppsON was designed to target infrastructure consolidation use cases, and data intensive workloads. AppsON provides small to extra large storage resources, with small to medium compute resources.
From an infrastructure consolidation standpoint, this is the use case AppsON is currently dominating. We are seeing customers extremely attracted by the small 2U footprint, and how it provides two active-active HA ESXi nodes without limitations that typically come in 2 node deployments such as needing an external witness, making it ideal for Edge and ROBO workloads. We are seeing customers transition these sites with a couple of different servers + SAN to a single PowerStoreX appliance resulting in significant infrastructure footprint and higher availability.
Customers are also attracted to the standardization on vSphere, allowing them to manage everything with a common skillset.
We also have customers using PowerStore X with AppsON for some very interesting data intensive workloads, that don’t huge amount of compute, but rather either lots of storage capacity and/or a mixture of lots of IOPS and low latency.
New Features:
Lets talk about some of the new features made available in recent code upgrades, including the recent 2.0 release. Note that some of these features are applicable to PowerStore in general, and not specific to PowerStore with AppsON.
AppsON Scale out
Scale-out is now supported with AppsON, allowing more compute and storage within a PowerStore X cluster, allowing for more workloads to be consolidated with AppsON. Up to 4 appliances are supported within a cluster, and the beauty of PowerStore’s scale-out is that the cluster can be made up of completely different model appliances with completely different capacities. In addition, our uniquely awesome vVol design is such that a single stretched vVol container spans across all appliances, presenting a single pool of storage accessible to all nodes simplifying management and load balancing.
Automated VASA Registration
Previously only available with PowerStore X models, PowerStore T now supports automated VASA registration directly from the PowerStore manager, making vVol setup as easy as it can get. Simply add in your vCenter information and press connect, automating VASA provider registration for your PowerStore.
After doing so, status of the connection is displayed:
This makes the PowerStore manager VMware aware, displaying vVol VMs directly in the PowerStore manager, along with the VM details, capacity utilization, VM and storage performance (including at the individual vVol level), alerting, and protection.
You can see your VM compute performance for the VM:
Storage performance for the VM:
And even performance for a specific individual vVol:
As a reminder, PowerStore’s vVol integration was built into the very DNA of the product:
vSphere host awareness
A new capability in PowerStore 2.0 (applies to both T and X models) is that the PowerStore manager becomes vSphere host aware, showing the correlation between PowerStore objects and their corresponding vSphere host. Lets take for example that I have an ESXi host that I have added that I named “My_ESXi” host. When talking to my vSphere admin, or if I am also a vSphere admin, I want to know what this host is known as in vSphere so that I know they are the same.
In the PowerStore manager, I can see the “My_ESXi” is known as “10.245.11.107” in vSphere and is running VMware ESXi 7.0.2, 17867351.
Now lets say I want to see which hosts my VMs that are using up PowerStore vVol storage are running. In the Virtual Machines view in the PowerStore manager, I can see exactly see that my VM called “Windows2019-Base” is running on an ESXi host known as “10.245.17.252” in vSphere.
Multi vCenter support for vVols
We have documented two methods for supporting multiple vCenters with the same VASA provider for using vVols across multiple vCenters. Although not a product limitation, and instead a VMware design (we are working hard with them to improve this) limitation, we have two approved methods for supporting this.
Option 1 is to use Enhanced Linked Mode. The second option is a procedure that involves the manual sharing of vCenter certificates across vCenters. You can find more details here: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000186239/powerstore-how-to-register-vasa-provider-with-vcenters-in-different-sso-domains
vSphere ROBO support:
Introduced in PowerStore OS version 1.0.3, in addition to vSphere Enterprise Plus, AppsON now supports vSphere ROBO (Advanced and Enterprise) licenses. vSphere ROBO licenses support a maximum of 25 virtual machines. While it is still recommended to use a vSphere Enterprise Plus license, ROBO is perfect for small environments. However, note that some features are not supported by vSphere ROBO Advanced and Enterprise licenses, such as DRS:
Bringing in an External Host into the PowerStore X vSphere Cluster
One of the unique capabilities of PowerStore X with AppsON is that it is dual personality: It allows VMs to run locally on the local ESXi nodes while at the same time also acting like a regular SAN in providing storage to external servers. Need a more compute in your vSphere AppsON cluster? Want to re-use existing servers from previous investments? No problem! As you can see here I have a two appliance PowerStore X cluster (4 hosts; 10.245.17.120-121, 10.245.17.252-253), and I have brought in my existing ESXi server called 10.245.11.107. This now provides additional compute to my vSphere cluster, and providing additional load balancing and HA if needed. This previously required an RPQ, but this is no longer needed. See the Virtualization Infrastructure Guide for more details.
Registering a host from vCenter
One of my favorite new features in the VSI plugin, is the ability to automagically “push” and register ESXi host from vCenter to the PowerStore manager. When dealing with many hosts, this is a HUGE time saver. Go to the VSI plugin in vCenter, click Storage Systems>Hosts>Add. This is applicable to all PowerStore models (T and X).
In this example I am registered my ESXi host known as 10.245.11.107 in vSphere to the PowerStore manager.
And can now see it in the PowerStore manager: