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vStart 50 VMware vSphere Solution Overview
Dell Inc. 11
5 Design Principles and Solution Capabilities
This section lists the design principles, requirements, and solution capabilities behind the vStart
solution architecture.
5.1 No Single Point of Failure
The solution is designed so that there is no single point of failure and redundancy is incorporated into
all mission critical components of the solution. Management applications are not architected with this
level of redundancy because the mission critical workloads will continue to operate in the event of a
management application failure.
Network redundancy for the mission critical components is achieved with redundant network interface
controllers (NICs) and redundant switches. VMware vSwitches provide failover and NIC teaming
functionality across the redundant network interfaces. Similarly, for iSCSI storage, redundancy is
achieved with redundant NICs, switches, and storage controllers. For both network and iSCSI traffic,
the redundant NICs are selected in such a way that they are mapped across the LAN On Motherboards
(LOMs) and add-in controllers to avoid any single point of failure. VMware High Availability (HA)
provides HA for VMs by restarting the VMs on other ESXi servers when an ESXi server failure is detected.
The solution also includes redundant power supplies connected to separate PDUs.
5.2 Physical Separation of LAN and iSCSI SAN Traffic
Dedicated NICs and switches are provided for iSCSI storage traffic to isolate the storage traffic from
LAN traffic. This ensures minimal latency for storage I/O operations.
5.3 Logical Separation of multiple LAN traffic types
Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) are used to provide security and logical separation of various
traffic types required for virtualization.
5.4 Requirements for Integration into an Existing Data Center
A database, domain name services (DNS), network time protocol (NTP), and routing between VLANs are
requirements for the vStart solution. The architectures assume that a network core and routing are in
place, and that a database is configured for VMware vCenter Server. DNS and NTP support must also
be configured and running in the customer’s environment prior to deploying a vStart solution. A site
survey may be needed to gather additional information and confirm customer requirements. Table 3
below provides more details about the requirements. For more information about the site survey,
please contact your Dell Sales and Services representatives.