Reference Architecture

Page 22
As storage I/O requests are generated on the ESXi hosts, the MEM plug-in will intelligently route these
requests to the array member best suited to handle the request. This results in efficient load balancing
of the iSCSI storage traffic, reduced network latency and increased bandwidth.
For more information on EqualLogic MEM, refer to white-paper, Configuring and Installing the
EqualLogic Multipathing Extension Module for VMware vSphere 5.1, 5.0 and 4.1 and PS Series SANs.
9 Management Infrastructure
Within the Active System 800v solution, two Dell PowerEdge R620 servers and one Dell Force10 S55
1/10GbE Ethernet switch are used for the management infrastructure. The Force10 S55 switch is used
for out-of-band management connectivity for Dell CMC, Dell iDRAC, and the management ports on Dell
EqualLogic arrays. The management cluster infrastructure imitates the compute cluster in using
converge network infrastructure and configuration. The PowerEdge R620 servers are connected to the
Force10 S4810 switches using Broadcom 57810 Dual Port 10Gb network adapters. The management
servers are connected to the EqualLogic storage through the two Force10 S4810 switches.
Note that the EqualLogic storage is shared between the management cluster and the compute cluster.
The EqualLogic storage must be sized so that sufficient capacity and bandwidth are allocated for both
the management VMs and compute VMs.
The PowerEdge R620 servers run VMware ESXi 5.1 hypervisor and are a part of the unique vSphere
Cluster for management. VMware High Availability is enabled in that cluster to provide HA for virtual
machines. Admission control is disabled in the VMware HA Cluster. If admission control is enabled,
VMware HA would prevent putting one of the management servers in maintenance mode, since this
would violate HA policy of having more than one active server in the cluster.
The Active System 800v solution includes the necessary management components required to manage
the Active System 800v infrastructure, including the Converged Infrastructure management software,
Dell Active System Manager. The following management components are included in the Active System
800v solution.
 Dell Active System Manager
 VMware vCenter Server
 Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter
 Dell OpenManage Essentials (OME)
 Dell EqualLogic Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) for VMware
 Dell EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters (HQ)
 Dell Repository Manager
 VMware vCloud Connector
These components are installed in virtual machines installed as virtual machines in the management
infrastructure as illustrated in Figure 7.