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vStart 50 Solution Overview
Dell Inc. 7
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. Management applications, however, are not
designed with this level of redundancy because the mission critical workloads continue to operate in
the event of a management application failure. Network redundancy for the mission critical
components is achieved with redundant network interface controllers (NICs) and redundant switches.
NIC teaming for LAN and MPIO for SAN are used to provide failover across the redundant network
interfaces.
iSCSI storage redundancy is achieved with redundant NICs, switches, and storage controllers. For both
network and iSCSI traffic, the redundant NICs are selected such that they are mapped across the rack
Network Daughter Card (rNDC) and add-in controllers to avoid any single point of failure. Hyper-V High
Availability (HA) is provided by Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering. The solution also includes an
optional redundant power supply connected to separate PDUs.
5.2 Physical Separation of LAN and iSCSI SAN Traffic
Dedicated NICs and switches are provided for iSCSI storage traffic to isolate the storage traffic from
LAN traffic. This helps to minimize network latency for storage I/O operations.
5.3 Logical Separation of multiple LAN traffic types
Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) are used to provide security and logical separation of various
traffic types required for virtualization.
5.4 Prerequisites and Datacenter Planning
A domain name services (DNS), network time protocol (NTP), Active Directory® Domain Services (AD
DS), and routing between VLANs are requirements for the vStart solution.
The vStart 50 architecture presumes that a network core and network routing are in place. Prior to
deploying a vStart solution, DNS support must be configured and running in the customer’s
environment. While not required, NTP is recommended for the environment. A site survey may be
needed to gather additional information and confirm customer requirements. Contact your Dell Sales
and Services representatives for more information about the site survey.