Dell PowerFlex Appliance with PowerFlex 3.x Architecture Overview

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System architecture

There are several options for a PowerFlex appliance deployment.

PowerFlex appliance is deployed as one of the following:

Hyperconverged
Two-layer
Hybrid-hyperconverged
Storage-only

The following figure is a high-level view of the physical PowerFlex appliance. This figure is not specific to a particular system but is a generic representation. The PowerFlex management environment depicted below can be deployed on an optional PowerFlex appliance management cluster, or a customer provided VMware ESXi host.

The following figure displays a PowerFlex appliance replication environment. The PowerFlex management environment depicted below can be deployed on an optional PowerFlex appliance management cluster, or a customer provided VMware ESXi host.

PowerFlex metadata managers (MDM) and storage data replication (SDR) need to communicate to each other across the WAN.

The following table describes components used in the diagrams:
Components in a deployment	Description
PowerFlex appliance management environment	PowerFlex Manager requires a VMware ESXi server hosting applications. The PowerFlex management environment can be deployed on an optional 3-node PowerFlex management cluster, or a customer provided VMware ESX host.
Customer provided resources	Embedded operating system jump server and VMware vCenter server. It is anticipated that these resources will already be installed and accessible.
Access A and B switches	These switches are partially configured by PowerFlex Manager or they are fully customer configured and connect directly to the PowerFlex appliance nodes.
Hardware management switch	Provides separate network connectivity of iDRAC and access switch management interfaces.
PowerFlex appliance customer environment	PowerFlex hyperconverged nodes PowerFlex compute-only nodes PowerFlex storage-only nodes
VLANs	VLANs that are required to be defined on the various switches, interfaces, and network interface cards (NICs).