Dell PowerFlex 4.6.x Technical Overview

Minimum requirements

These are the minimum system requirements for a PowerFlex implementation in a VMware ESXi-based system:

• Three VMware ESXi servers with 240 GB of free capacity per server
• 10 Gbps network

Components

The PowerFlex hyperconverged configuration consists of a dedicated storage virtual machine (SVM) and these software components:

• Storage virtual machine (SVM): A Linux-based virtual machine dedicated to PowerFlex and is used to host the different PowerFlex software components described here.
• Meta data manager (MDM): Configures and monitors the PowerFlex system. The MDM is configured in a redundant cluster mode. The MDM is installed on the SVM. The MDM can be configured as a three-node cluster (primary MDM, secondary MDM, and tiebreaker MDM) or as a five-node cluster (primary MDM, two secondary MDMs, and two tiebreaker MDMs) to provide greater resiliency.
• Storage data server (SDS): Manages the capacity of a single server and acts as a backend for data access. The SDS is installed on all servers contributing storage devices to the PowerFlex system. These devices are accessed using SDS. The SDS is installed on the SVM.
• Storage data replicator (SDR): Handles volumes replication activities between PowerFlex systems through journal management. The SDR is located alongside the SDS.
• Storage data client (SDC): A lightweight device driver that presents PowerFlex volumes as block devices to the application on the server which the SDC is installed. The SDC creates a logical adapter, which is an VMware ESXi kernel construct. The adapter informs VMware ESXi about the arrival and disappearance of SCSI devices. These LUNs can be formatted with VMFS and then exposed using the VMware ESXi host to the virtual machine or can be used as RDM devices.

This implementation is shown in the figure. The SDC is installed within the VMware ESXi kernel similar to any other VIB.

The LUNs in this example can be formatted with VMFS, and then exposed using the VMware ESXi host to the virtual machine, or the LUNs (volumes) that are NVMe target based can be used as RDM devices. When the LUNs are used as RDM devices, the VMFS layer is omitted.

Supported features

The following VMware features are supported by PowerFlex:

• vMotion
• Storage vMotion
• Fault tolerance
• DRS
• Storage DRS
• VAAI (except full copy primitive)

Device management

Devices can be managed with VMDirectPath I/O.

Pre-deployment considerations

You should take these considerations into account before deploying the system: