Dell PowerFlex Appliance and PowerFlex Rack with PowerFlex 3.x VMware NSX Ready Architecture Overview

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VMware vSphere architecture for NSX ready

This section provides a high-level architecture overview of PowerFlex rack and PowerFlex appliance that describe the VMware vSphere architecture to meet VMware NSX requirements.

The following table contains VMware vSphere requirements for PowerFlex rack and PowerFlex appliance.

NOTE:These requirements are recommendations for PowerFlex appliance if the PowerFlex controller nodes or NSX Edge nodes are provided by the customer.


VMware vSphere cluster	Requirements for PowerFlex rack and PowerFlex appliance
Management cluster	Created as a single VMware vSphere cluster and added within the PowerFlex data center. HA and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) enabled at the VMware vSphere cluster level. VMware vSAN vSphere cluster enabled, if three or more nodes are present. Includes the VMware vSphere core VMs (virtual channels, PowerFlex management controller, and any Dell appliances). The three NSX Manager VMs also run in this cluster.
NSX Edge cluster	Created as a single VMware vSphere cluster and added in the PowerFlex data center. HA enabled and DRS disabled at the VMware vSphere cluster level, if running the vSAN storage option. Deployed across multiple physical racks (split between two racks). By default, local storage with RAID 10 is enabled. However, vSAN is supported if VMware services or the customer chooses this option. Includes NSX Edge gateway VMs, deployed at the customer site, that provide logical routing. At minimum, four of the six NIC interfaces that are used for transport and external edge traffic must be configured as an individual trunk. The other two NIC interfaces that are used for VMware ESXi management or vSAN traffic are configured with Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) enabled vPC. NOTE:Do not deploy non-NSX Edge workloads in the NSX Edge VMware vSphere cluster.
Compute cluster	Created as a single VMware vSphere cluster and added within the PowerFlex data center. Can be deployed across multiple physical racks. HA and DRS are enabled at the VMware vSphere cluster level. Includes the customer production VMs. Can have more than one compute cluster. On a compute cluster, the management distributed switch must be configured without LACP. The switch carries overlay NSX ready transport traffic, and VMware does not recommend using LACP.