Dell PowerFlex 4.5.x Technical Overview

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Terminology for management offerings

The following table describes important PowerFlex Manager terms and concepts for the PowerFlex management offerings.

Table 1. Terms and conceptsThe following table describes important PowerFlex Manager terms and concepts for the PowerFlex management offerings.
Term	Description
Bring your own hypervisor	Allows customer to supply a hypervisor to host the Kubernetes VM or environment. Enables setup of the PowerFlex management platform system for management purposes in ESXi or Kubernetes VM.
Co-residency	The PowerFlex storage-only nodes in a protection domain runs the management of the system.
Management data store (MDS)	The PowerFlex management data store is on the dedicated multi-node controller. It is not the same as the data store used in a co-resident option. Kubernetes VMs host the management containers that reside on this data store.
Management virtual machine (MVM)	The PowerFlex Manager UI is hosted in a Kubernetes environment running across a series of Linux machines. The VM version is called the management VM. The operating system is a customized SLES. version that is maintained by Dell Technologies.
PowerFlex management controller	The infrastructure underlying the PowerFlex management platform in a dedicated multi-node configuration. It is mandatory in the PowerFlex rack, and optional for PowerFlex appliance The physical controllers with ESXi hosting PowerFlex management platform can be a three-node or a five-node ESXi cluster with: VSAN (PowerFlex management controller 1.0) PowerFlex as shared storage (PowerFlex management controller 2.0) PowerFlex management controller also hosts VMs for vCenter, a jump server, and other optional NSXT or CloudLink managers.
PowerFlex management platform	The management software stack for PowerFlex runs on physical or virtual Linux instances, which are containers that provide services. This management solution can be implemented on various infrastructure options.