Reference Guide

vStart 100 and 200 VMware vSphere Reference Architecture
Dell Inc 9
3.1.5 Dell Hardware and Storage Management integrated into vCenter
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter is included in the solution. This enables customers to:
 Get deep-level detail from Dell servers for inventory, monitoring, and alerting — all from
within vCenter
 Apply BIOS and Firmware updates to Dell servers from within vCenter
 Automatically perform Dell-recommended vCenter actions based on Dell hardware alerts
 Access Dell hardware warranty information online
 Rapidly deploy new bare metal hosts using Profile features
EqualLogic HIT/VE Plug-in for vCenter is also included in the solution. HIT/VE enables customers to:
 Create and manage Smart Copies and Smart Clones of VI objects
 Schedule creation of Smart Copies and Smart Clones
 Provision new datastores and expand existing datastores
 Create and deploy Virtual Desktops (This is outside the scope of this solution, and requires
additional software.)
For more information on Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter see the Dell Management Plug-in
for VMware vCenter web page. For more information about the Dell EqualLogic HIT/VE Plug-in for
VMware vCenter see Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Toolkit VMware Edition (HIT/VE)
Auto-Snapshot Manager 3.0 at:
http://www.dellstorage.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=1616&terms=HIT%2fVE
4 Design Principles and Solution Capabilities
This section lists the design principles, requirements, and solution capabilities behind the vStart
solution architecture.
4.1 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.