Installation Guide

HP DCN Infrastructure Requirements and Recommendations 9
HP VRS-G
For low volume deployments the software based HP VRS Gateway (VRS-G) module
incorporates bare metal as virtualized extensions to the datacenter.
HP DCN Infrastructure Requirements and
Recommendations
In order to make use of the HP DCN, the data center environment must meet some key
requirements as described in the following sections.
Data Center IP Network
HP VSP can be used in any data center with an IP network. HP VSC actively participates in the
IP routing infrastructure. HP VSCs can run OSPF or IS-IS for the IGP in addition to BGP, but
integration with the IGP is not mandatory.
BGP is used to form a federation of HP VSCs and synchronize the HP VSP network information.
In addition, BGP is also used to exchange routing information with the data center provider
edge router.
NTP Infrastructure
Because HP VSP is a distributed system, it is important that the different elements have a
reliable reference clock to ensure the messages exchanged between the elements have
meaningful timestamps. HP VSP relies on each of the elements having clocks synchronized with
NTP.
The HP VSD and HP VRS applications rely on the NTP facilities provided by the host operating
system. The HP VSC, which is based on HP DCN OS, has an NTP client.
HP recommends having at least three NTP reference clocks configured for each system.
Domain Name System
In scaled HP VSP deployments, the HP VSD functional elements can be distributed across
machines into clusters of machines where the failover and load sharing mechanisms for the
clusters rely on being referenced as a single DNS entity.
Certificate Authority
The northbound ReST API on HP VSD is accessed within an SSL session. The HP VSD is able to
use a self-signed certificate, but having a certificate from a certificate authority will enable
client applications to avoid processing security warnings about unrecognized certificate
authorities.
HP DCN Installation Overview
Installing HP DCN consists of installing the three software components (HP VSD, HP VSC, and
HP VRS) and configuring their interfaces to establish connectivity between them.