Cisco Solution for EMC VSPEX™ Server Virtualization · Reference Architecture . EMC VSPEX . April 2012 . Cisco Solution for EMC® VSPEX™ Server Virtualization Microsoft® Hyper-V™

Reference Architecture

EMC VSPEX

April 2012

Cisco Solution for EMC® VSPEX™ Server Virtualization Microsoft® Hyper-V™ for 100 Virtual Machines Enabled by Cisco Unified Computing System, Cisco Nexus switches, Microsoft Hyper-V, EMC® VNXe3300™, and EMC Next-Generation Backup

Cisco Solution for VSPEX Server Virtualization Microsoft Hyper-V for 100 Virtual Machines

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Copyright © 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA.

Published April 2012

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Part Number: h10710.1

3 Cisco Solution for VSPEX Server Virtualization Microsoft Hyper-V for 100 Virtual Machines

Table of contents

Reference architecture overview .................................................................................... 5 Document purpose ..................................................................................................................... 5 Solution purpose ........................................................................................................................... 5 The business challenge ............................................................................................................... 6 The technology solution .............................................................................................................. 6 Solution benefits ........................................................................................................................... 7

Key components ............................................................................................................... 8 Introduction................................................................................................................................... 8 Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers ................................................................................... 8 Cisco Nexus 5000 series Switches ............................................................................................... 9 Microsoft Hyper-V ......................................................................................................................... 9 Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager ............................................................... 9 EMC Storage Integrator .............................................................................................................. 9 EMC VNXe Series .......................................................................................................................... 9

Software suites available ...................................................................................................... 10 Software packs available .................................................................................................... 10

EMC Avamar .............................................................................................................................. 10

Solution architecture ....................................................................................................... 12 Logical architecture diagram .................................................................................................. 12 Reference architecture overview ........................................................................................... 12 Hardware resources................................................................................................................... 14 Software Resources ................................................................................................................... 16

Server and Network architecture .................................................................................. 18 Topology ...................................................................................................................................... 18 Server details ............................................................................................................................... 18 Network Layout .......................................................................................................................... 18

Storage architecture ....................................................................................................... 18 Storage layout ............................................................................................................................ 19 Storage layout overview ........................................................................................................... 19

High availability and failover ......................................................................................... 20 Introduction................................................................................................................................. 20 Storage layer .............................................................................................................................. 20


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Connectivity layer ...................................................................................................................... 20 Host layer ..................................................................................................................................... 20

Validated environment profile ....................................................................................... 21 Profile characteristics ................................................................................................................. 21

Backup environment profile ........................................................................................... 22 Backup characteristics .............................................................................................................. 22 Backup layout ............................................................................................................................ 22

Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 23

References ....................................................................................................................... 24 Cisco documentation ............................................................................................................... 24 EMC documentation ................................................................................................................. 24 Other documentation ............................................................................................................... 24


Reference architecture overview This document describes the reference architecture of the Cisco Solution for EMC® VSPEX™ server virtualization for 100 virtual machines. This document provides guidelines for building similar solutions.

VSPEX pre-validated and modular architectures are built with proven best-of-breed technologies to create complete virtualization solutions that enable you to make an informed decision in the hypervisor, compute and networking layers. VSPEX eliminates server virtualization planning and configuration burdens. VSPEX infrastructures accelerate your IT Transformation by enabling faster deployments, greater flexibility of choice, efficiency, and lower risk.

This reference architecture is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to every aspect of this solution. Server capacity is provided in generic terms for required minimums of CPU, memory and network interfaces; the customer is free to select the server and networking hardware of their choice that meet or exceed the stated minimums.

Cisco solution for VSPEX features enterprise-class Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Servers and Nexus switches delivering performance, versatility, and density without compromise. Cisco’s portfolio of products and technologies offers a holistic approach to the design, operation, and delivery of IT services. This approach makes it easier for IT to integrate existing technology silos and:

• Respond more quickly to business demands

• Reduce capital expenditures and operating expenses

• Simplify IT operations

These platforms optimized for Virtualization, manageability, performance and scalability are ideal for:

• Consolidation and virtualization

• Private cloud computing

• Application or infrastructure-as-a-service

For more detailed information on performance and scalability testing, refer to EMC VSPEX Server Virtualization Solution Microsoft Hyper-V for 100 Virtual Machines Enabled by Microsoft Hyper-V and VNXe3300—Deployment Guide of this solution and associated documentation for best practices and specific usage requirements.

Document purpose

Solution purpose


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Customers require a scalable, tiered, and highly available infrastructure on which to deploy their business and mission-critical applications. There are several new technologies available to assist them in consolidating and virtualizing their server infrastructure, but they need to know how to use these technologies to maximize their investment, support service-level agreements, and reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO).

This solution addresses the following challenges:

• Availability: Standalone servers incur downtime for maintenance or unexpected failures. Clusters of redundant standalone nodes are an inefficient in use of CPU, disk and memory resource.

• Server management and maintenance: Individually maintained servers require significant repetitive activities for monitoring, problem resolution, patching, and other common activities. This is labor intensive, costly, error-prone, and inefficient. Security, downtime, and outage risks are elevated.

• Ease of solution deployment: While small and medium businesses must address the same IT challenges as larger enterprises, staffing levels, experience, and training are generally more limited. IT generalists are often responsible for managing the entire IT infrastructure, or reliance is placed on third party sources for maintenance or other tasks. Perceived complexity of the IT function raises fear of risk and may block adoption of new technology. Therefore, simplicity of deployment and management are highly valued

• Storage efficiency: Storage added locally to physical servers or provisioned directly from a shared resource or array leads to over-provisioning and waste.

• Backup: Traditional backup approaches are slow and frequently unreliable. There tends to be inflection points (or plateaus) in the virtualization adoption curve when the number of virtual machines increases from a few to 100 virtual machines or more. With a few virtual machines, the situation seems manageable and most organizations can get by with existing tools and processes. However, when the virtual environment grows to 100 virtual machines, the backup and recovery become the limiting factor in deployment.

This solution uses the Cisco UCS C220 M3 Rack-Mount Server, Cisco Nexus 5548UP switch, EMC VNXe3300™ array and Microsoft Hyper-V to provide storage and server hardware consolidation. The new virtualized infrastructure is centrally managed, allowing efficient deployment and management of a scalable number of virtual machines and associated shared storage.

The business challenge

The technology solution


This VSPEX solution enables the customer that is new to server virtualization to realize the following benefits:

• Application Availability—Highly available, scalable infrastructure that makes most efficient use of CPU, memory, and storage resources and grows with the business

• Simplified and centralized management of server and storage deployment, monitoring, patching, and other normal activities, resulting in lower management overhead, reduced risk, and reduced downtime

• Simplicity of solution deployment and use, targeting the IT generalist in the small or medium business (SMB) and providing ease of use, integration points, and ability to mask complex tasks through the use of advanced wizards

• Storage Efficiency—EMC VNXe™ array features optimized storage efficiency, reduced over-provisioning and simplified storage management

• Backup—Integration with EMC’s next-generation backup solutions offering virtual machine and application backup and recovery capabilities.

Solution benefits


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Key components This section briefly describes the key components of this solution.

• Cisco UCS C-Series Servers

• Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches

• Microsoft Hyper-V

• Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager

• EMC Storage Integrator

• EMC VNXe Series

• EMC Avamar

Solution architecture on page 12 provides details on all the components that make up the reference architecture.

Cisco Unified Computing SystemTM is the first truly unified data center platform that combines industry-standard, x86-architecture blade and rack servers with networking and storage access into a single system. Key innovations in the platform include a standards-based unified network fabric, Cisco Virtualized Interface Card (VIC) support, and Cisco Extended Memory Technology. The system uses a wire- once architecture with a self-aware, self-integrating, intelligent infrastructure that eliminates the time-consuming, manual, error-prone assembly of components into systems.

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack servers reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility by extending Cisco Unified Computing System™ innovations to a rack-mount form factor. These servers:

• Offer a form-factor-agnostic entry point into Cisco UCS, which is a single converged system with configuration automated through integrated, model-based management

• Simplify and speed deployment of applications

• Increase customer choice with unique benefits in a familiar rack package

• Offer investment protection through the capability to deploy them either as standalone servers or as part of the Cisco Unified Computing System.

Introduction

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers


Nexus® 5000 series Switches deliver an innovative architecture to simplify data center transformation by enabling a high-performance, standards-based, multi-protocol, multi-purpose, Ethernet-based fabric. They help consolidate separate LAN, SAN, and server cluster network environments into a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabric. This unification enables network consolidation and greater utilization of previously separate infrastructure and cabling, reducing by up to 50 percent the number of adapters and cables required and eliminating redundant switches. This infrastructure displacement also lowers power and cooling costs significantly.

Microsoft Hyper-V can transform or virtualize computer hardware resources, including the CPU, RAM, hard disk, and network controller. This transformation creates fully functional virtual machines that run their own operating systems and applications just like physical computers.

While the Hyper-V Manager console provides critical functionality for creating and running a Virtual Machine, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) makes the job faster and simpler. Additionally, SCVMM provides monitoring, reporting, migration, and conversion services that are not available in the Hyper-V Manager. SCVMM or a similar tool should be considered to set up and manage the Hyper-V virtual infrastructure.

Microsoft System Center Essentials provides many of SCVMM’s capabilities and includes other features of the System Center family at a lower price point, with some limitations in function and ease of use.

EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) simplifies the provisioning of EMC block and file storage to Windows servers. Current supported capabilities include the following:

• Provision, format and present drives to Windows servers

• Provision new cluster disks and add them to the cluster automatically

• Provision shared CIFS storage and mount it to windows server

• Provision SharePoint storage, sites and databases in a single wizard. The EMC VNX™ family is optimized for virtual applications delivering industry-leading innovation and enterprise capabilities for file, block, and object storage in a scalable, easy-to-use solution. This next-generation storage platform combines powerful and flexible hardware with advanced efficiency, management, and protection software to meet the demanding needs of today’s enterprises.

Cisco Nexus 5000 series Switches

Microsoft Hyper-V

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager

EMC Storage Integrator

EMC VNXe Series


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The VNXe™ series is powered by Intel Xeon processor, for intelligent storage that automatically and efficiently scales in performance, while ensuring data integrity and security.

The VNXe series is purpose-built for the IT manager in smaller environments and the VNX series is designed to meet the high-performance, high-scalability requirements of midsize and large enterprises.

Table 1. VNXe customer benefits

Feature

Next-generation unified storage, optimized for virtualized applications

Capacity optimization features including compression, deduplication, thin provisioning, and application-centric copies

High availability, designed to deliver five 9s availability

Multiprotocol support for file and block

Simplified management with EMC Unisphere™ for a single management interface for all network-attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN), and replication needs

Note: VNXe does not support block compression.

Software suites available

• Local Protection Suite—Increases productivity with snapshots of production data.

• Remote Protection Suite—Protects data against localized failures, outages, and disasters.

• Application Protection Suite—Automates application copies and proves compliance.

• Security and Compliance Suite—Keeps data safe from changes, deletions, and malicious activity.

Software packs available • VNXe3300 Total Protection Pack—Includes the Local Protection,

Remote Protectuion and Application Protection Suites. EMC’s Avamar® data deduplication technology seamlessly integrates into virtual environments, providing rapid backup and restoration capabilities. Avamar’s deduplication results in vastly less data traversing the network, and greatly reduces the amount of data being backed up and stored – translating into storage, bandwidth and operational savings.

EMC Avamar


The following are two of the most common recovery requests made to backup administrators:

• File-level recovery: Object-level recoveries account for the vast majority of user support requests. Common actions requiring file-level recovery are–individual users deleting files, applications requiring recoveries, and batch process-related erasures.

• System recovery: Although complete system recovery requests are less frequent in number than those for file-level recovery, this bare metal restore capability is vital to the enterprise. Some common root causes for full system recovery requests are–viral infestation, registry corruption, or unidentifiable unrecoverable issues.

The Avamar System State protection functionality adds backup and recovery capabilities in both of these scenarios.


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Solution architecture The architecture diagram of this solution characterizes the infrastructure validated for support of up to 100 virtual machines.

Figure 1 shows the overall logical architecture of the solution.

Figure 1. Logical architecture

The architecture includes the following components:

Cisco UCS C220 M3 Server - The Cisco® UCS C220 M3 rack-mount server is designed for performance and density over a wide range of business workloads from web serving to distributed database.

Building on the success of the Cisco UCS C200 M2 rack-mount server, the enterprise-class UCS C220 M3 server further extends the capabilities of Cisco’s Unified Computing System portfolio in a 1U form factor with the addition of the Intel® E5-2600 series product family CPUs that deliver significant performance and efficiency gains. In addition, the UCS C220 M3 server provides 16 DIMM slots, 8 drives and 2 x 1 GbE LOM ports delivering outstanding levels of density and performance in a compact package. This platform currently holds the world record for key industry standard benchmarks such as SPECint_rate_base2006, SPECjbb2005 and SPECfp_rate_base2006 against comparable platforms.

Cisco Nexus 5548UP switches - The Cisco Nexus 5548UP is a 1RU 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and FCoE switch offering up to 960 Gbps of throughput and up to 48 ports. The switch has 32 unified ports and one expansion slot. The Cisco Nexus 5500 platform is equipped with expansion modules that can be used to increase the number of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and FCoE ports or to connect to Fibre Channel SANs with 8/4/2/1-Gbps

Logical architecture diagram

Reference architecture overview


Fibre Channel switch ports, or both. The Cisco Nexus 5548UP supports one expansion module from the following offerings : • Ethernet module that provides sixteen 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet and FCoE ports using the SFP+ interface • Fibre Channel plus Ethernet module that provides eight 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet and FCoE ports using the SFP+ interface, and eight ports of 8/4/2/1-Gbps native Fibre Channel connectivity using the SFP+/SFP interface • A unified port module that provides up to sixteen 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet and FCoE ports using the SFP+ interface or up to sixteen ports of 8/4/2/1-Gbps native Fibre Channel connectivity using the SFP+ and SFP interface. The use of 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet or 8/4/2/1-Gbps Fibre Channel on a port is mutually exclusive but selectable for any of the 16 physical ports per module. In addition to these expansion modules, the Cisco Nexus 5548UP supports a Layer 3 daughter card that can be ordered with the system or as a spare (field upgradable). This daughter card provides up to 160 Gbps of Layer 3 forwarding capability (240 million packets per second [mpps]) that can be shared by all 48 ports in the chassis. Layer 3 daughter card does not take up one of the expansion slots on the rear of the chassis, but instead is installed by replacing the Layer 2 I/O module (N55-DL2) that is located on the front of the chassis.

• In addition to three expansion module, the Cisco Nexus 5596UP supports Layer 3 module, which provides up to 160 Gbps of Layer 3 forwarding capability (240 mpps) that can be shared by all the I/O ports in the chassis.

• Version 2 of Layer 3 Daughter Cards and Expansion Modules have enhanced hardware capability that increases host table size from 8K to 16K or multicast routes from 4K to 8K (enabled in future software release).

Microsoft Hyper-V—Provides a common virtualization layer to host a server environment. The specifics of the validated environment are listed in Table 2. Hyper-V provides highly available infrastructure through features such as failover clustering and redundant hardware components.

Cisco Adapter FEX Technology - Adapter FEX is a Cisco I/O virtualization technology that enables consolidation of multiple physical networks on the same 10Gb cable.

• Cisco Adapter FEX technology brings fabric interconnect ports directly to operating systems and hypervisors.

• These server-based remote line cards plus the fabric interconnect create a virtual modular switching system that is physically distributed yet logically centralized.


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• Isolates and secures network and I/O traffic so that it can be centrally controlled and managed.

• Multiple traffic classes such as production, backup, and management can be separated onto different networks with separation maintained throughout the system.

• Cisco Adapter FEX technology is implemented by Cisco virtual interface cards with a pre-standard implementation of the IEEE 802.1Qbh Port Extender standard.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)—SCVMM is not required for this solution. However, if deployed, it (or its corresponding function in Microsoft System Center Essentials) greatly simplifies provisioning, management, and monitoring of the Hyper-V environment.

Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Server—SCVMM, if used, requires an SQL server database instance to store configuration and monitoring details. SQL Express may be used with System Center Essentials and can run on the same virtual machine as Essentials.

IP Network—All network traffic is carried by standard Ethernet network with redundant cabling and switching. User and management traffic is carried over a public network while storage traffic is carried over a private, non-routable subnet.

Shared Infrastructure—Domain name system (DNS) and authentication/authorization services like Microsoft Active Directory can be provided through existing infrastructure or set up as part of the new virtual infrastructure.

EMC VNXe3300 array—Provides storage by presenting Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) datastores to Hyper-V hosts. These datastores are created using application aware wizards that are included in the EMC Unisphere interface.

Table 2 lists the hardware used in this solution. Hardware

resources


Table 2. Solution hardware

Hardware Configuration Notes

Hyper-V servers

Memory: • 2 GB RAM per virtual machine (200 GB

RAM across all servers) • 2 GB RAM reservation per Hyper-V host CPU: • One vCPU per virtual machine • Four vCPUs per physical core Network: • Six 1 GbE NIC ports per server

Configured as a single Hyper-V cluster.

Cisco Nexus 5548 UP

Two Nexus 5548 UP switches with: • 32 x fixed Unified ports (Supports 10 GbE,

FCoE, FC) • 1 x 1 GbE Management port

Redundant LAN configuration

EMC next-generation-backup

Avamar • One Gen4 Utility Node • One Gen4 3.9TB Spare Node • Three Gen4 3.9TB Storage Nodes Data Domain • One Data Domain DD640 • One ES30 15x1TB HDD

EMC VNXe3300

• Two Storage Processors (active / active) • Two 1 GbE interfaces per storage

processor • Seventy seven 300 GB 15k rpm 3.5-inch

SAS disks (11 * 300 GB 6+1 R5 Performance Drive Packs)

• Three 300 GB 15k rpm 3.5-inch SAS disks as hot spares

This can include the initial disk pack on the VNXe.


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Hardware Configuration Notes

Cisco UCS C220 M3

5 x C220 M3 servers each with::

• 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650 processor

• 64 GB (8 x 8GB 1600 MHz) memory

• 2 x 600 GB SAS 15k RPM hard disk

• 1 x Cisco P81E 10 GbE Dual port PCIe card (for 10 GbE Network)

• 2 x 1 GbE LOM (onboard Ethernet)

• 1 x 10/100/1000 Mbps dedicated Management port

These servers and the roles they fulfill may already exist in the customer environment

Table 3 lists the software used in this solution.

Table 3. Solution software

Software Configuration

Cisco UCS Server

Cisco UCS C220 M3 1.4(4a).1

Network

Cisco Nexus 5548UP version 5.1(3)N1(1a)

VNXe3300

Software Version 2.2.0.16150

Microsoft Hyper-V

Operating system for Hyper-V hosts

Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition SP1 (Enterprise or Datacenter edition is necessary for failover functionality)

Microsoft SQL Server Version 2008 R2 Standard Edition

Next-generation data protection

Avamar 6.0.0-592

Data Domain OS 5.1.0.9-282511

Virtual Machines

Base operating system Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2

Software Resources


VNXe3300

VDBench 5.02 Note: VDBench was used to validate this solution. However, it s not required in this configuration.


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Server and Network architecture The architecture diagram in this section shows the server configuration and network topology (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Server configuration and Network topology

The Server uses the following configuration:

• The server uses local boot with mirrored drives for operating system

• The VMs created on the server are stored in iSCSI LUNs provisioned on the VNXe 3300 storage.

• Cisco adapter FEX technology is used to carve dynamic vNICs.

• Network adapters are teamed for fault tolerance and throughput.

The network layout is as follows:

• Management, Storage, Cluster and Production traffic are provisioned as separate VLANs using 1GE and 10GE connectivity

• Virtual port channels are implemented on two Nexus switches for redundant loop-free topologies.

Topology

Server details

Network Layout


Storage architecture The storage architecture diagram in this section shows the physical disk layout. Disk provisioning on the VNXe series is simplified through the use of wizards, so the administrator does not choose which disks belong to a given storage pool. The wizard may choose any available disk of the proper type, regardless of where the disk physically resides in the array.

Figure 3 shows the overall storage layout of the solution.

Figure 3. Storage layout

The reference architecture uses the following configuration:

• Seventy seven 300 GB SAS disks are allocated to a single storage pool as eleven 6+1 RAID 5 groups (sold as 11 packs of 7 disks).

• EMC recommends that at least one hot spare disk is allocated for each 30 disks of a given type.

• At least ten iSCSI LUNs are allocated to the Hyper-V cluster from the single storage pool to serve as datastores for the virtual servers.

Storage layout

Storage layout overview


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High availability and failover This VSPEX solution provides a highly available virtualized server and storage infrastructure. Each component is configured to provide a scalable, robust architecture for the host, connectivity, and storage layers.

The VNX family is designed for five 9s availability by using redundant components throughout the array. All of the array components are capable of continued operation in case of hardware failure. The RAID disk configuration on the array provides protection against data loss due to individual disk failures, and the available hot spare drives can be dynamically allocated to replace a failing disk.

The advanced networking features of the VNX family provide protection against network connection failures at the array. Each Hyper-V host has multiple connections to user and storage Ethernet networks to guard against link failures. These connections are spread across multiple Ethernet switches to guard against component failure in the network.

The Hyper-V servers have redundant power supplies and network connections to reduce the impact of failure of these components. Failover Clustering is configured on the Hyper-V cluster to help recover virtual servers quickly in case of a complete host failure.

Introduction

Storage layer

Connectivity layer

Host layer


Validated environment profile The solution was validated with the following environment profile.

Table 4. Profile characteristics

Profile characteristic Value

Number of virtual machines 100

Virtual machine OS Windows Server 2008 R2

Processors per virtual machine 1

Number of virtual processors per physical CPU core

4

RAM per virtual machine 2 GB

Average storage available for each virtual machine

100 GB

Average IOPS per virtual machine 25 IOPS

Number of datastores to store virtual machine disks

10

Number of virtual machines per datastore 25

Disk and RAID type for datastores RAID 5, 300 GB, 15k rpm, 3.5-inch SAS disks

Profile characteristics


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Backup environment profile The solution was sized with the following application environment profile.

Table 5. Profile characteristics

Profile characteristic Value

Number of Users 1000

Number of virtual machines 100 (20% DB, 80% Unstructured)

Exchange data 1TB (1GB mail box per user)

SharePoint data 0.5 TB

SQL server 0.5 TB

User data 5 TB (5.0 GB per user)

Daily Change Rate for the applications

Exchange data 10%

SharePoint data 2%

SQL server 5%

User data 2%

Retention per data types

All DB data 14 Dailies

User data 30 Dailies, 4 Weeklies, 1 Monthly

Avamar provides various deployment options depending on the specific use case and the recovery requirements. In this case, the solution is deployed with both Avamar and Data Domain managed as a single solution. This enables the unstructured user data to be backed up directly to the Avamar system for simple file level recovery. The database protection is managed by the Avamar software, but it is directed to the Data Domain system with the embedded Boost client library. This backup solution unifies the backup process with industry leading deduplication backup software and storage, and achieves the highest levels of performance and efficiency.

Backup characteristics

Backup layout


Conclusion Cisco solution for VSPEX has been engineered to enable the small or medium business to simply, quickly, and reliably deploy a broad range of shared storage workloads. Setup wizards enable an IT generalist to provision Hyper-V storage with a short series of mouse clicks, with recommended best practices applied automatically. In conjunction with Hyper-V, VNXe provides a proven and economical path to server virtualization for the small or medium business.

Table 6. Solution benefits

Feature Benefits Cisco Unified Computing System

First truly unified platform that combines industry-standard, x86-architecture blade and rack servers with networking and storage access into a single system. The system uses a wire- once architecture with a self-aware, self-integrating, intelligent infrastructure delivering dramatic improvement in TCO.

Cisco Nexus series Switches

Designed for a broad range of physical, virtual, storage access, and high-performance computing environments, thus giving customers the flexibility to meet and scale their IT requirements in a gradual manner and at a pace that aligns with their business objectives.

EMC next-generation backup

Unifies the backup process with industry leading deduplication backup software and storage, and achieves the highest levels of performance and efficiency.

EMC VNXe unified storage Provides a robust, reliable, high-performance, common storage platform for many virtual servers. A single storage platform that is efficient, powerful, and built for the most demanding virtual environments.

Microsoft Hyper-V Provides a well-established virtualization platform for Windows server consolidation.

This reference architecture provides a blueprint of a validated server virtualization solution enabled by EMC VNXe series, the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization platform, and protected by EMC next-generation backup.


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References For documentation on

• Cisco Unified Computing System, please refer to the website http://www.cisco.com/go/unifiedcomputing

• Cisco Nexus series Switches, please refer to the website http://www.cisco.com/go/nexus

• Cisco Validated Designs, please refer to the website http://www.cisco.com/go/dcdesignzone

The following documents, available on EMC Online Support website provide additional and relevant information. If you do not have access to a document, contact your EMC representative:

• EMC VSPEX Server Virtualization Solution Microsoft Hyper-V for 50 Virtual Machines Enabled by Microsoft Hyper-V, VNXe3100, and EMC Next-Generation Backup — Reference Architecture

• EMC VSPEX Server Virtualization Solution Microsoft Hyper-V for 100 Virtual Machines Enabled by Microsoft Hyper-V and VNXe3300— Deployment Guide

• EMC VSPEX Server Virtualization Solution Microsoft Hyper-V for 0 -100 Virtual Machines – Sizing Guide

For documentation on Microsoft Hyper-V, SCVMM, and System Center Essentials, refer to the Microsoft web site at http://www.microsoft.com.

Cisco documentation

EMC documentation

Other documentation

http://www.cisco.com/go/unifiedcomputing

http://www.cisco.com/go/nexus

http://www.cisco.com/go/dcdesignzone

http://www.microsoft.com/

Documents

Cisco Solution for EMC VSPEX™ Server Virtualization · Reference Architecture . EMC VSPEX . April 2012 . Cisco Solution for EMC® VSPEX™ Server Virtualization Microsoft® Hyper-V™