Dell PowerFlex 4.5.x Technical Overview

Host network awareness

PowerFlex 4.5 considers the host networks for resiliency. When a host is losing a network, it can still use other paths through available networks to access the storage.

Network sets

PowerFlex 4.5 supports specifying networks that might fail together. NVMe over TCP connections are allocated to the NVMe over TCP hosts through multiple network sets, offering resiliency to the failure of the network set.

Fault sets support

NVMe over TCP supports fault sets. Connections allocated to the NVMe over TCP are through targets on multiple fault sets that provide path resiliency to a fault set failure.

NVMe reservations support (SCSI-3 equivalent)

PowerFlex 4.5 supports NVMe reservations (SCSI-3 equivalent) with NVMe over TCP.

Persistent discovery controller

NVMe over TCP hosts connect to PowerFlex 4.5 through persistent discovery, which enables automatic updates of the hosts regarding storage side changes.

Migration to NVMe over TCP

PowerFlex 4.5 provides the option to migrate workloads from SDC to NVMe over TCP on ESXi:

1. Online migration using Storage vMotion (VMFS only)
   • The standard way of moving storage is with Storage vMotion. Storage vMotion also supports switching protocols by migrating to a new DataStore. For more information, see the Dell PowerFlex 4.5.x Administration Guide.
2. Offline migration (VMFS only)
   • There is a new option for converting an existing VMFS datastore from SCSI (SDC) to NVMe over TCP without having all the data over the network. The offline migration steps are covered in this KB article.