Cisco Cisco HyperFlex HX220c M4 Node White Paper

Page 5 of 31

Solution Benefits

This solution provides the following benefits to customers:

●

Simplicity: The solution is designed to be deployed and managed easily and quickly through familiar tools

and methods. No separate management console is required for the Cisco HyperFlex solution.

●

Centralized hardware management: The cluster hardware is managed in a consistent manner by service

profiles in Cisco UCS Manager. Cisco UCS Manager also provides single-point console and firmware

management capabilities. Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform (SDS) clusters are managed through a plug-in

to VMware vCenter.

●

High availability: Component redundancy is built in to most levels at the node. Cluster-level tolerance to

node, network, and fabric interconnect failures is implemented as well.

●

Efficiency: Complementing the other management efficiencies are features such as thin provisioning, data

deduplication, compression, cloning, and snapshots to address concerns related to overprovisioning of

storage.

●

Flexibility:

“pay as you grow”: Customers can purchase the exact amount of computing and storage they

need and expand one node at a time up to the supported cluster node limit.

Customers who have already invested in Cisco

products and technologies have the opportunity to mitigate their

risk further by deploying familiar and tested Cisco UCS technology.

Main Components

A Cisco HyperFlex cluster can consist of three to eight nodes that are similarly configured, except in a mixed

configuration that includes blades and hyperconverged nodes. The best practice is to create a highly available

cluster with N+1 resiliency, in which the cluster can sustain all virtual machines with one node in maintenance

mode or in a failed state. This solution requires a minimum of four converged nodes per cluster. Converged nodes

have processing, cache, and capacity layers together in a unit such as a Cisco HyperFlex HX220c M4 Node.

Each node has a 120-GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive, used for Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform housekeeping

and logs, and a larger 480-GB high-endurance SSD drive, used for write logs and for caching read and write data.

Storage capacity is provided by a set of six 1.2-terabyte (TB) 10,000-rpm 12-Gbps SAS hard disk drives (HDDs).

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series nodes are managed by Cisco UCS Manager hosted in a pair of fault-tolerant, low-

latency Cisco UCS fabric interconnects.

The network layer can be any pair of switches with 10-Gbps bandwidth. In this case, a pair of Cisco Nexus 9372

platform switches in standalone mode is used for connection to the existing network. The hypervisor used is

VMware ESXi 6.0 U1.