Your first HCI Deployment - A step-by-step guide by Lenovo_DCG Marketing

Your first HCI Deployment A step-by-step guide

A Plan for Success As business becomes increasingly complex and demanding, IT organizations around the globe are leveraging the cloud to deliver services faster and more efficiently. From flexibility with control to better security without breaking the budget, there are many reasons to move away from a hardware-centric approach and embrace the softwaredefined future. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) helps you achieve that by converging compute, storage (including storage networking) and management onto industry-standard x86 servers. It eliminates physical hardware silos to create an infrastructure that is faster and far more flexible—so that you can deliver services on demand. It is not always easy to initiate such a big change, but here is the good news—implementing HCI does not have to be complicated. Our guide will show you how to prepare for a seamless transition, from pre-deployment to post-deployment, so you can start realizing the benefits of the cloud faster than ever.

Phase 1: Pre-Deployment Before you deploy HCI, it is crucial that you understand your current environment and the changes that need to take place. You will need to: • Know your platform. Are you already using VMware vSphere®? If so, you can use VMware vSANTM for shared storage. vSAN is a storage platform built into the vSphere kernel, making it easy to enable. If your infrastructure is already virtualized or you are moving toward virtualization, then HCI with Virtual SAN is a natural fit, given its integration with what is already a familiar data center tool. • Set up conversations among teams. If you still manage multiple silos, make sure your teams talk to one another before you implement HCI. Iron out new responsibilities to minimize politics, and leverage one another’s networking, storage, and compute virtualization knowledge. Because HCI eliminates many traditional processes and delivers a platform that can be managed by storage, server, or vSphere admins, understanding the efficiencies gained with HCI will help you to strategically plan and allocate resources. • Understand your needs. HCI is not an all-or-nothing endeavor. If your storage and server hardware is less than three year old, it might be possible to simply add HCI

software on top of it. And don’t forget to check if you can add SSDs or HDDs to your existing servers, which will allow you to get HCI up and running with the same benefits at a fraction of the cost. You can also increase your existing external storage capacity (such as SAN or NAS arrays) by running Virtual SAN on your vSphere cluster. This will provide different storage options for your applications and will simplify migration activities during upgrades or hardware end-of-life. • Learn more about your workloads and use cases. If you need Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), running VMware Horizon® on top of Virtual SAN can be a good fit from a consolidation standpoint. You can start small with a 3-node configuration and scale to 64 nodes. It is easy to size and grow the environment with predictable performance. Likewise, for Remote Office Back Office (ROBO), you can start small with a 2-node configuration to minimize costs. vSAN can also be used to simplify the management of business critical applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and SAP. • Take a free Virtual SAN assessment. If you are running into performance and capacity problems with your current storage environment or you are experiencing complexity or expensive renewals, find out if Virtual SAN is a fit. Get a free, comprehensive analysis of your environment for recommendations that match your business needs.

Phase 2: Deployment You can deploy HCI in just 7 steps.

1. Choose your deployment model • Build-Your-Own. If you already have a server certified for vSphere, you have the right environment. You can add certified controllers and drives yourself. But you will need to make sure you proceed with your own check prior to deployment.

Take a look at the VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) to ensure that your Lenovo hardware is supported and certified.

Virtual SAN is simple to enable, use and manage, but make sure you validate your full list of items and have all the right pieces in place before checking that box.

• Virtual SAN Ready Nodes. These nodes are pre-certified servers based on a profile that addresses different needs, such as Hybrid and All-Flash. You can specify your workload type on the VMware sizer website and it will let you know the Ready Nodes you can use. Lenovo has a wide range of published pre-validated Ready Nodes configurations. • HCI Appliance with Lenovo. When you want the simplest, fastest deployment with turnkey solution, choose the Lenovo ThinkAgile VX series. With the power and the reliability of the Lenovo servers, ThinkAgile VX provides a simple, cost-effective hyper-converged solution for a wide variety of applications and workloads. Please visit this link to find more information on the new Lenovo appliances, powered by vSAN.

Certified HCI Solutions

Customize a pre-certified vSAN Ready Note

Flexibility

Engineered HCI Appliance

Choose a turnkey solution with the Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Appliance

Deployment speed

Figure 1: Choose the deployment option that best suits your needs

Meet Jonathan McDonald For 11 years, Jonathan McDonald has worked with VMware customers to help them design and deploy IT infrastructure and align IT objectives with business goals. He has earned 18 VMware certifications, including VMware Certified Advanced Professional for Datacenter Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure Administration.

“In my experience, the best way to avoid the pitfalls in an HCI deployment is to make sure you have the necessary hardware, software and configurations in place before you get started. 90% of the problems I see can be avoided by validating before you start.” Jonathan McDonald Technical Solutions Architect VMware

2. Size your nodes • Understand your needs. How many nodes you need depends on your choice of risk tolerance and SLAs, your workloads, the amount of capacity you want to consume and the features you want to enable. For instance, if you want erasure coding, you can’t go with 3 node conﬁguration—you will need at least 4 nodes. That is because Raid-5, which supports erasure coding, needs a minimum of 4 nodes in the cluster to allow the system to tolerate one failure. • vSAN TCO and sizing calculator. This easy-to-use calculator will tell you how much capacity and how many nodes you need based on your requirements for consolidation ratio, performance requirements, whether ALL-Flash or Hybrid is a better ﬁt, and more. Find out more > • Determine how many nodes you need. You should know:

2 nodes work the same as 3 nodes, but with the exception of using a witness host to ensure that split-brain conditions do not occur. In a 3-node configuration, you have some data and some metadata on all 3 nodes which store this same data and no witness is required. From an availability perspective, you could be in a degraded configuration of 2 nodes if you take one down for maintenance.

From a best practices standpoint, 4 nodes are recommended. To handle a single failure with a hot repair, you need to have a 4th node.

A minimum of 4 nodes is required for ALL-Flash/erasure coding—and a 5th node is ideal. If you are using erasure coding with protection of 2 failures, you will need 6th or 7th node.

Some customers in a 2-node ROBO configuration have multiple disk groups per node for more protection.

3. Plan how to configure network interfaces • Don't sweat the small stuff and take easy decisions: Use 2 switches (a pair of either Lenovo ThinkSystem NE1032 RackSwitch or Lenovo RackSwitch G8272) instead of a single switch. Why? Because using one switch only would be a single point of failure and of course not recommended in a data center environment. The 2 switches setup as VLAG (MC LAG) peers allow for active-active NIC connections from the host to be setup. Set the vSwitch to load balancing for the IP-based route hashing to spread the traffic over the 2 NIC links and allow for uninterrupted connectivity on the remaining link (should a switch or an uplink become unavailable). Take a deeper dive into these topics over here https://lenovopress.com/lp0662.pdf or here https://lenovopress.com/lp0663.pdf. • Double-check the details. Make sure there is sufficient bandwidth to connect the hyper-converged system to the rest of your network. Check networking at the switch or simply enable vSAN traffic at the host. vSAN requires a correctly configured network for virtual machine I/O as well as communication among cluster nodes. Since the majority of virtual machine I/O travels the network due to the distributed storage architecture, highly performing and available network configuration is critical to a successful vSAN deployment. Check out the Virtual SAN Network Design Guide for more information. >

4. Figure out licensing vSAN licensing includes VMware vSphere distributed switch (VDS) and policy-based management. And vSAN is included in VMware Horizon Advanced Edition and Enterprise suite, so there’s no additional cost for licensing. Compare the 3 VSAN editions online to identify the right features for your environment. >

5. Set up a test environment • Test out potential workloads that will run on your HCI environment and test the network configuration. • Set up a small lab or do a Proof of Concept (POC) to test the Virtual SAN (or vSAN as per above comments) solution. • See what other users have done. Please check out on lenovosuccess.com all the customers who are using vSAN on Lenovo systems.

6. Take one step at a time • Start small and scale out, so you can grow comfortably—and confidently—with HCI. The right HCI solution will allow you to scale up and scale out quickly and non-disruptively. “It’s always smart to do a proof of concept trial before you launch into a full production environment. That way, you can better understand the challenges, including technical and organizational, as well as how to address them, before you start a production deployment.” Jonathan McDonald, Technical Solutions | Architect VMware You no longer need to plan for budget-breaking capital expenditures and can always match the exact needs of your workloads.

Scale up. Add new capacity through the persistent tier or add more flash capacity to the cache tier for increased performance.

Scale out. Start with as few as two nodes and non-disruptively add nodes to scale compute and storage.

• Branch out and plan new deployments. For example, it is common to first deploy vSAN management clusters and then to other use cases. You can also take advantage of other opportunities to transition to HCI such as migration initiatives and alignment with refresh cycles. • Take it slow. A slow transition minimizes risk and disruption, so you can have a strong foundation for success.

7. Deploy • Know your deployment model. Ready Nodes are racked and stacked solutions that are already configured so you stand up vSAN in less than 30 minutes. The Lenovo ThinkAgile VX appliance, on the other hand, has a professional service team* who will do all the work for you. Just like Ready Nodes, you can be up and running in a matter minutes. * For detailed information on professional services, reach out to your Lenovo Representative.

• Setup — the easy way

vSAN is seamlessly embedded in the hypervisor, so installation and configuration are done with a few mouse clicks from the vSphere Web Client. If you have the latest VMware release, then you already have vSAN ready to go. This allows you to create a new VM so you can go through the existing workflow you already know with vSphere.

In your cluster you can enable vSAN as easily as enabling VMware High Availability (VMware HA) and VMware Distributed Resources Scheduler (VMware DRS). With the cluster wizard, you can pick checkboxes if you want to setup fault domains, stretch clusters, dedupe and compression, or enable a 2-node cluster. Then, create your disk groups you want to use for which tier. Once done, you can create the vSAN datastore. There is no need to create change requests for LUNs—simply use the default policies.

Virtual SAN Datastore Figure 2: Take advantage of a radically simple approach to storage

Phase 3: Post-Deployment Once you completed deployment, it is time to start realizing all the benefits HCI has to offer. To get the most out of your investment, you will need to: • Understand day-to-day management. If you know vSphere, you can easily manage vSAN; it is all in the same interface–vSphere Web Client. The vSAN data store is a cluster-level resource. Within that cluster, you can manage vSAN datastore in the same location you manage and monitor other aspects of your data center. You get visibility into how many IOPs you have, and what your latencies are from the same vCenter client.

Performance and capacity monitoring. Integrated in vCenter and the Web Client, you can use a single pane of glass to deploy, manage and then monitor the Virtual SAN cluster. Advanced monitoring capabilities built into the tool provide easy access to key information about your HCI environment.

Troubleshooting. With the integrated Health Service feature, you can better understand the health of your data/network, whether one host can talk to another host, the latencies that are out of tolerance, and any issues with your hardware when upgrading. You can also get proactive tests to simulate a workload.

• Leverage existing tools to enjoy additional automation. Additional tools are optional and available to users who want more automation and visibility across the entire software-defined data center.

Trending and forecasting with VMware vRealize® Operations.™ Understanding trending and wear-leveling from an SSD perspective can also help with forecasting. For instance, if you continue to provision VMs with the capacities you have at this particular rate, you can find out at what point will you need more.

Provisioning with vRealize Orchestrator. Further automate provisioning with vRealize Orchestrator. Design and automate complex workflows in just a few clicks, and get a centralized administrative interface for an efficient configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting experience.

HCIbench for benchmarking. HCIbench (free to download) makes it easier to automate testing across an HCI cluster. The tool fully automates the end-to-end process of deploying test VMs, coordinating workload runs, aggregating test results and collecting necessary data for troubleshooting purposes. You can tax the vSAN system and see what you can get out of it.

• Upgrade processes. We recommend a balanced conﬁguration from a capacity perspective - if you just need more compute today but not capacity, you can start with high CPU computation power and add storage capacity later. You can add capacity devices and disk groups, provided your frame allows it. You can scale out by adding nodes or scale up by adding capacity. You can also ensure predictable performance by starting very small and scaling up. You can go from 2 nodes up to 64 nodes with no need for a forklift upgrade. “What sets VMware apart is that we are truly hyperconverged. By embedding Virtual SAN into the hypervisor, you get better reliability and performance.” Jonathan McDonald, Technical Solutions | Arhitect VMware

Why VMware Hyper-Converged Infrastructure? VMware, the market leader in powering hyper-converged infrastructure, enables the lowest-cost and highest-performance next-generation HCI solutions. The natively integrated software from VMware combines radically simple vSAN storage, the market-leading vSphere® hypervisor and the vCenter Server uniﬁed management solution with the broadest and deepest set of HCI deployment choices.

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Figure 3: A single integrated software stack provides flexibility and control

Conclusion If you know vSphere, you can easily manage vSAN and implement HCI. With Storage Policy Based Management, you can custom-tailor performance or protection based on an individual virtual machine or an individual virtual machine device. That means no more LUNs and no need to carve up multiple drives with a particular performance proﬁle just for one workload. The VMware HCI solution is ideal for large, mixed workloads where you can custom-tailor a single virtual machine to make sure it gets what it needs.

The solution that delivers more • Radically simple. VMware delivers one integrated software stack with streamlined management from a single pane of glass. • Lowest cost. VMware offers pay-as-you-grow pricing, so that you pay only for what you need, when you need it. • Highest performance. VMware ensures consistent performance for every application, with enterprise-class availability and built-in failure tolerance. • Ready for any app, any scale. VMware gives you versatility in a fast-moving world, with solutions designed for the applications of today and tomorrow.

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