This article indicates the overview of VPLEX VS2 Hardware.

VPLEX System Components:

The VPLEX system consists of the following components:

1, 2, or 4 VPLEX engines -  Each engine contains two directors. Dual-engine or quad-engine clusters also contain 1 pair of Fibre Channel switches for communication between directors and 2 uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) for battery power backup of the Fibre Channel switches and the management server.

• A management server.  Coordinates data collection, VPLEX software upgrades, configuration interfaces, diagnostics, event notifications, and some director-to-director communication. Forwards VPLEX Witness traffic between directors in the local cluster and the remote VPLEX Witness server.
• Ethernet or Fibre Channel cabling and respective switching hardware connect the distributed VPLEX hardware components.
• I/O modules provide front-end and back-end connectivity between SANs and to remote VPLEX clusters in VPLEX Metro or VPLEX Geo configurations.
• UPS - dual and quad configurations contain redundant Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) that service the FC switches and the Management Server.
• SPS  - The pair of SPS units provides DC power to the engines in case there is a loss of AC power. The batteries in the SPSs can hold a charge up to 10 minutes. However, the maximum hold time is 5 minutes.

Engine:

A VPLEX VS2 Engine is a chassis containing two directors (A and B) , redundant power supplies, fans, I/O modules, and management modules. The directors are the workhorse components of the system and are responsible for processing I/O requests from the hosts, serving and maintaining data in the distributed cache, providing the virtual-to-physical I/O translations, and interacting with the storage arrays to service I/O.

Following figure shows a VPLEX engine and its two directors: Director A and Director B and backend modules.

Two four-port 8 Gbps Fibre Channel I/O modules provide 40 Gbps effective bandwidth: four ports for front-end connectivity and four ports for back-end connectivity. This shows us that there is a planned oversubscription within the VPLEX.

• 10GB/s Ehternet (Vplex Geo)
• Filler Module  (Vplex Local Only).

Few changes comparing with previous VS1 engine:

• The VS2 Engine is physically smaller than VS1 Engine (2U vs. 4u).
• There are fewer I/O modules (5 vs. 6).
• The CPU and PIC-E bus are also faster.

Serial Number:

In general, VPLEX system serial number (Top Level Assembly #)  is on the rear side, in the right corner of engine like following figure.

Director naming methods:

Director-1-1-A

First ‘1’ means one of the Directors in Cluster-1 (Site A)

Second ‘1’ means one of the Directors in Engine -1 (  Engine in site A)

The meaning of ‘Director-1-1-A’ is Director A in Engin-1 of Cluster-1.

SFP Location methods:

Following figure indicate the Vplex SPF location:

Management Server (MS)

The VPLEX Management Server is the central point of management for a VPLEX system. It ships with a dual-core Xeon 3065 2.33 GHz processor, a 250 GB SATA near-line drive and 4 GB of memory. The Management Server interfaces between the customer network and the VPLEX cluster. It isolates the VPLEX internal management networks from the customer LAN. It communicates with VPLEX firmware layers within the directors over the private IP connections. One Management server ships with each VPLEX cluster.

Shown is the high-level architectural view the management connections between the Management Server and directors. In this picture there are NO internal VPLEX IP switches. The directors are in fact daisy chained together via two redundant Ethernet connections. The Management Server also connects via two redundant Ethernet connections to the directors in the cluster. The Management Server is the only VPLEX component that gets configured with a public IP on the data center network. From the data center IP network, the Management Server can be accessed via SSH or HTTPS.

Fibre Channel COM Switch:

VPLEX medium systems use 4 ports per switch. VPLEX large systems use 8 ports per switch. The inter COM network is completely private. No other connections are permitted on the switch. The Connectrix DS-300B connects to independent USPs. There is no option for Cisco and the switches are unavailable for customer use.

SPS and UPS

Independent power zones in the data center feed each VPLEX power zone, providing redundant high availability. Each engine is connected to 2 standby power supplies (SPS) that provide a battery backup for cache vaulting in the event of transient site power failure. In single-engine clusters, the management server draws its power directly from the cabinet PDU. In dual- and quad-engine clusters, the management server draws power from UPS-A.

Each VPLEX engine is supported by a pair of standby power supplies (SPS) that provide a hold-up time of five minutes, allowing the system to ride through transient power loss. A single standby power supply provides enough power for the attached engine. Each standby power supply is a FRU and can be replaced with no disruption to the services provided by the system. The recharge time for a standby power supply is up to 5.5 hours. The batteries in the standby power supply are capable of supporting two sequential five-minute outages.

Each director is connected to a standby power supply. The Standby power supplies should be connected to separate power sources. Generally, the SPS On Battery LED stays on while the SPS units fully charge (which could be a few minutes or a few hours, depending on the state of the battery). If any amber LED not related to the SPS recharge remains on for more than 10 minutes, verify that the components are cabled correctly.

Internal Cabling:

For detailed VPLEX VS2 cabling configuration, please refer VPLEX Configuration Guide  (Page 104)  from EMC Online Support

Author: Fenglin Li

   

iEMC APJ

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