Dell PowerFlex Appliance with PowerFlex 3.x Architecture Overview

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Base configurations and scaling in a two-layer deployment

PowerFlex appliance has a base configuration that is a minimum set of PowerFlex compute-only nodes and PowerFlex storage-only nodes and fixed network resources.

Within the base configuration, the following hardware aspects are customizable:


Hardware	Dell Technologies recommends...
Compute	A minimum of three PowerFlex compute-only nodes.
Storage	Six PowerFlex storage-only nodes (four minimum).
Network	An optional management switch and a minimum of two access switches.
Management	An optional three-node PowerFlex management controller running VMware ESXi to host PowerFlex Manager and other system software. A single PowerFlex management controller can also be used for this purpose. NOTE:The single node controller is configured with the internal drives in a RAID5 configuration in order to provide enhanced local storage resiliency as there is only one node. The three node management environment does not include local RAID storage since there is additional redundancy provided by the fact that there are multiple hosts in the cluster. The single node management cluster can also be expanded into a three-node cluster.
Cabling	25 GB SFP28 direct attached copper - four for each storage only and compute only node. 100 GB QSFP28 direct attached copper - two for access switch uplinks and two for access switch VLT/VPC interconnects. 1 GB CAT5 or CAT6 - one for each node for iDRAC connectivity and one for each access switch for management connectivity.