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vStart 50 Solution Overview
Dell Inc. 4
3.2 Product Overview
This section provides an overview of the components in the solution.
3.2.1 PowerEdge R620 for Hypervisor Cluster
The Dell PowerEdge R620 uses Intel® Xeon® E5 2600 series processors and Intel chipset architecture in
a 1U rack mount form factor. The PowerEdge R620 supports up to ten 2.5” drives. There is also an
option for an LCD on the front of the server for system health monitoring, alerting, and basic
management configuration. (Note: The LCD option is only available on 8-drive bay chassis.) The server
features two CPU sockets and 24 memory slots supporting 2, 4, 8,16 or 32GB DIMMs to meet the varied
memory demands of a virtualized infrastructure.
Energy-efficient design features include power-supply units sized appropriately for system
requirements, innovative system-level design efficiency, policy-driven power and thermal
management, and highly efficient standards-based Energy Smart components. For more information,
see the PowerEdge R620 Technical Guide.
3.2.2 EqualLogic PS6100 for iSCSI Storage
The Dell EqualLogic PS6100 is a virtualized iSCSI SAN that combines intelligence and automation with
fault tolerance to provide simplified administration, rapid deployment, enterprise performance and
reliability, and seamless scalability. The storage architecture delivers a self-optimizing SAN that is
simple to manage and has an all-inclusive software suite to help reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
In the vStart 50, the PS6100X uses 10,000 RPM Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 2.5” form factor disk drives to
provide capacity and performance for a range of applications.
With a 24 drive chassis full of 300GB SAS drives, the PS6100X array delivers 7.2 Terabyte (TB) of iSCSI-
based storage built on fully-redundant, hot-swappable enterprise hardware. Scale out capacity and
performance is provided by adding additional arrays. Built-in software functionality includes automated
load balancing, snapshots and replication, multi-path I/O (MPIO), and consistency sets. SAN HQ is also
available for Multi-SAN historical performance monitoring.
Advanced data protection features such as Auto Replication and Auto-Snapshot Manager (ASM) also
come standard. ASM Microsoft Edition provides intelligent and consistent snapshots for the Windows
Server 2012 hosts and the Hyper-V environment.
Multipath IO (MPIO) capabilities are enhanced by the EqualLogic HIT KIT. The HIT Kit configures MPIO
load balancing and redundant iSCSI initiator configurations for Windows Server-based hypervisor hosts.
For more information about the HIT Kit for Windows Servers, see Dell EqualLogic Host Software.