Cisco Cisco HyperFlex HX240c M4 Nodes with Cisco UCS B200 Blade Servers White Paper
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Executive Summary
VMware offers the vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS or dvSwitch) feature for centralized management of virtual
switches in VMware ESX clusters. Since the introduction of vDS in ESX 4.0, this feature has gained widespread
adoption in many virtualized landscapes. With the initial launch of Cisco HyperFlex
™
Systems, the networking
configuration of our hyperconverged product is installed and configured automatically using standard ESX virtual
switches (vSS or vSwitch). To better align with the common practice of using vDS when customers are licensed to
do so, Cisco allows the conversion of networks that do not support Cisco HyperFlex infrastructure, such as virtual
machine guest networks and VMware vMotion networks, to use distributed virtual switches instead of standard
virtual switches.
Solution Overview
This section defines current IT Infrastructure challenges and presents a high-level view of the solution and its
benefits.
Document Purpose
This document describes how to convert guest networks and port groups in a Cisco HyperFlex cluster to use vDS
instead of the standard vSwitches.
Solution Purpose
Cisco HyperFlex solutions are built on the Cisco Unified Computing System
™
(Cisco UCS
®
) platform. They offer
faster deployment, greater flexibility and efficiency at a competitive price while lowering risk for the customer.
Proven components from Cisco are integrated to form a software-defined storage (SDS) platform. The approach
eliminates or reduces the number of decisions that need to be made related to planning and configuration, while
allowing customization to meet customer workload needs. The platform and management model adopted is an
extension of the established Cisco UCS data center strategy in which familiar components are managed in a
consistent manner through a policy-based framework with Cisco UCS Manager.
Business Challenge
Use of standard vSwitches in any ESX virtualized infrastructure presents several challenges:
●
Inefficiency: Standard switches must be configured one by one, on each individual host of a vSphere
cluster. Any configuration change must be repeated on each host across the cluster to remain consistent.
●
Discrepancy: Configurations across multiple standard switches can be set differently, which can lead to
configuration faults and to failure of virtual machines to migrate across hosts.
●
Lack of features: Standard vSwitches lack features needed in large-scale and next-generation
environments.
The Solution
Cisco HyperFlex Systems can be converted to use vDS instead of standard vSwitches for networks that are not
part of the Cisco HyperFlex core infrastructure.
Solution Benefits
This solution provides the following benefits to customers:
●
Simplicity: vDS is configured once in VMware vCenter. Then all the hosts in the vSphere cluster are
attached to it, and they inherit the configuration.