Exploring HCI

Running head: EXPLORING HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE 1

Exploring Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

David HanITEC 610

Professor Abdollah Abtahi

November 6, 2015


Abstract

Over the last 10 years the emergence virtualized server technology has been adopted at a

rapid pace. Consolidating many server functions into fewer hardware platforms can reduce

hardware maintenance costs, the need for floor space expansion, centralized management, rapid

new system deployments, increased uptime, and ease of system backups and implementing

disaster recovery sites. However, as legacy equipment and technology was first used to deploy

server virtualization, those hardware limitations are increasingly affecting system performance as

demand increases. To address this issue, hyper-converged infrastructure solutions for virtual

environments have been developed over the last five years by combining storage arrays with the

hypervisor and networking into a single platform for efficiency and performance increases. This

research paper will discuss how the combination of computing, storage, and networking into

hyper-converged infrastructure solutions will continue to advance server virtualization

technology and define the term software defined data centers (SDDC). Different solution

providers will be introduced and compared, and how those solutions benefit virtualized

environments. Advantages and disadvantages of converged systems is discussed and compared

to hyper-converged infrastructure solutions. Future trends of hyper-convergence solutions for

virtualizing SAN and data centers will be introduced and discussed. The goal of this paper is

introducing new hyper-converged technology and how the solutions will be the foundations of

future data centers.


Contents

Abstract 2

Table of Contents 3

Introduction 4

Converged vs. Hyper-Converged 5

Advantages and Disadvantages 8

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Vendors 12

Future Trends 16

Discussions 17

Conclusion 18

References 20


Introduction

While hardware virtualization can trace its roots back to the 1960's, it was the release of ESX

Server, a dedicated operating systems (OSs) for hosting virtual machines called a type 1

hypervisor, by VMware in 2001 that led to mainstream adoption of virtualized server technology

(Conroy, 2011). Eventually ESX was joined by other type 1 hypervisors from other vendors,

such as Citrix, KVM, and Microsoft Hyper-V. Traditionally hypervisors are installed on existing

stand-alone server hardware or into server blades with traditional server OSs deployed as virtual

servers within each host. Virtual machines (VMs) are either stored on local drives, which limits

features such as migrating VM’s to another data store, or on shared enterprise storage solutions,

such as NAS or SAN. Physical connections between the computing, storage, and network

components are still required, but the logical connections to the VMs are managed and

configured through a virtual switch. As each element of the VM is managed and stored by

separate systems and resources are increased to meet growing demands, the footprints of the

individual components grow proportionally. Each segment of computing, network, and storage is

managed and configured individually, requiring subject matter experts in their respective fields.

With the recent emergence to dynamically provision virtualized desktops, the performance

bottleneck of traditional SAN and NAS storage became an issue. To address the shortfalls of

these separate systems, increase performance and efficiency, the latest trend is combining the

computing, storage, and networking into a single centrally managed hardware platform through

commodity computing and distributed storage. Hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI) are the

latest efforts to simplify the entire computing, network, and storage stacks into the simplest form

for ease of deployment, upgrade, and management and eliminates legacy infrastructure silos. The

future trend for private and public cloud implementations is HCI.


Converged vs. Hyper-Converged

A converged solution is a pre-integrated platform combining the computing, storage, and

networking into a single rack, or block. While it has elements similar to traditional VM

infrastructure as there are physical connected to each other, components of converged solutions

are optimized and preconfigured to operate dependently. Purchasing additional blocks to increase

resources and capacity require minimal configuration updates as the entire stack is managed

centrally. Unlike hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, components from the block can be

configured to operate independently from each other (Lawton, 2014). A subsidy of EMC called

Virtual Computing Environment, or VCE, is the industry leader of converged solutions with

Vblock, which integrates Cisco servers and networking with EMC storage and VMware

virtualization software (VCE, 2015). Vblocks utilize Cisco Unified Computer Systems (UCS)

integrating computing nodes, switching fabric, and Cisco UCS Manager management software

into a single platform to host hypervisors. Cisco USC Manager centrally manages all

configurations, such as MAC address, firmware, and BIOS for the computing nodes. Enterprise-

level Vblocks include EMC applications Avamar, Data Domain, and RecoverPoint for data

backup, deduplication, and recovery. Cisco Nexus modular switching equipment to EMC storage

are pre-configured and tested for optimal performance. The traditional market for Vblocks has

been enterprise level datacenters with the starting price tag of $650,000. VCE has recently,

however, started offering lower cost options for smaller data centers at $100,000 (Babcock,

2013). Below Figure 1 is an example of a VDI implementation of VCE Vblock capable of

supporting 7000 users.


EMC’s VSPEX is another option for organizations to migrate to a converged solution with the

goal of implementing a private cloud while retaining existing hardware. EMC provides a

comprehensive hardware compatibility list that has been pre-tested for meeting performance

benchmarks called reference architecture. Organizations have the flexibility to choose either

VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop for virtual desktop solutions and VMware or Microsoft

Hyper-V private cloud solutions. While this solution retains the central management capability

of a converged solution and advantage of independent hardware selection over VCE Vblocks,

organizations would still need support contracts from separate vendors.

The term hyper-converged is derived from the combining of computing, networking, and storage

into a single form-factor. Unlike rack-sized converged solutions, hyper-converged infrastructure

solutions are physically smaller-sized appliances and measured in rack units. Each hyper-

converged node resembles a single rack mounted server. Management software is deployed as a

Figure 1 (Image courtesy of jasongaudreau.com)


virtual machine which can centrally manage one to multiple appliances supporting industry

standard hypervisors such as ESXi, XenServer, Hyper-V, or KVM. Hyper-converged solution

implements the concept of commodity computing by utilizing a central management console to

integrate inexpensive hardware components in parallel to deliver high-performance and high-

availability virtual environments. The environment is seen by the management software as a

single pool of computing and storage resources. As additional nodes are deployed to increase

computing cores, memory, or storage, the resources are dynamically added into the resource

pool. Because hyper-converged infrastructure solutions operate from a single node, a data center

is not required and therefore is ideal for small or medium-sized businesses. Below Figure 2 is a

visual representation of how servers, switches, and storage are virtualized into a single hyper-

converged hardware platform by Nutanix.

Figure 2 (Image courtesy of nutanix.com)


Advantages and Disadvantages

Both converged and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions offer advantage of reduced

hardware footprint in the datacenter which reduces power consumption, cooling costs, and other

environmental requirements. The modular design of both solutions allow for scalability that is

easily integrated for additional resources. Both converged and hyper-converged infrastructure

solutions are designed with substantial virtual infrastructure performance increases over

traditional non-converged solutions through optimized transmission architecture from computing

to storage and network components. Known as single pane of glass, configuration, management,

and upgrades are greatly simplified through single a management software application

eliminating configuration requirements on the individual server, network, and storage

components. No longer are configurations maintained on individual hardware components, but

can now be dynamically assigned by engineers through a single console.

One of the greatest advantages of a converged hardware solution is lower support and

maintenance costs. In a traditional data center, hardware issues are complicated to troubleshoot

since there are different vendors for computing, storage, and networking. Many different subject

matter experts are required to properly support the variety of hardware types from various

manufacturers. While converged infrastructure is similar in components, since the hardware is

single-sourced, troubleshooting is simplified to only contacting one vendor. This reduces the

training and familiarization requirements for the IT staff as the components are centrally

managed and updated. Another advantage is the integration of the computing, storage, and

network hardware into a single management console. Engineers would not have to go the

hypervisor management page to deploy a VM, then go to the sever chassis management page


such as HP iLO or Dell DRAC to check on server health, and then use a telnet session to SSH

into network switches to make configuration changes. Since all the hardware is already

preinstalled, prewired, and tested in the racks, deployment time is considerable shorter than

having to install individual components in existing data center racks, cable and then test the

systems.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is designed to be the easiest to deploy and implement. The

greatest advantage of hyper-converged infrastructure is the rapid deployment ability of the

solution. Implementation time is usually measured in hours instead of days or weeks in

traditional virtual environment deployments and requires a smaller engineer team as the solution

is implemented in individual nodes. Another advantage is lower cost compared to purchasing

additional enterprise storage or converged infrastructure blocks since a specific requirement for

resources of computing and storage can be scaled in nodes. Performance advantages to the

solution are built-in data deduplication, compression, and snapshot backup capabilities. Data

deduplication reduces wasted data storage space by compressing and removing duplicate data

blocks. Distributed storage is another key advantage of HCI as the storage across all the nodes

can be configured as one logical pool. This provides a robust fail safe system against loss as

multiple disk or entire node failures would not affect data integrity. Another advantage of

distributed storage is performance in terms of input/output as the bandwidth is spread across all

the nodes in parallel read/write operations similar to IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS)

or open source Lustre file systems for high performance computing. Unlike traditional SAN

configurations where spindle disks and solid state drives (SSDs) are specifically allocated to

separate storage pools, hyper-converged storage can utilize the performance advantages in a

hybrid solution across the entire infrastructure. By allowing options of mixing solid states disks


with hard drives, organizations can save money by utilizing more spindle drives and upgrade to

more expensive SSDs with future upgrades. Since the core of a hyper-converged solution is the

management software, as the nodes become obsolete, new hardware nodes are easily

incorporated without having to reconfigure the entire system. Most hyper-converged

infrastructure solutions eliminate the need for traditional RAID storage configurations and the

overhead associated with it as well as dynamically configure the storage pool size as needed.

Unlike a traditional storage area network (SAN) block level data store which requires

virtualization software such as VMware vStorage File System (VMFS) to allow sharing of a

logical unit numbers (LUNs) by multiple virtual servers, clustered file systems, also known as

distributed filesystems in a hyper-converged infrastructure solution, are able to utilized network

file system (NFS) file level data stores without decreased performance from network chatter.

This is accomplished by virtualizing the NFS controller, eliminating the physical connections

from NFS storage to server (Nutanix, n.d.). By also utilizing flash array hardware, the highest

performance in input/output per second (IOPS) is also achieved. Virtual desktop infrastructures

(VDIs) and databases are two technology areas that benefit the most from the performance

advantages of hyper-converged infrastructure file systems. In figure 3 below, Nutanix

Distributed File System illustrates how a hybrid of solid state and hard disk drives are utilized in

a clustered storage pool. Nutanix requires a minimum of three physical nodes are required to

form a cluster.


The major disadvantage of converged solutions is being dependent on a single vendor for the

entire computing, storage, and network hardware and inability to replace any individual

component from another vendor. Because systems are preconfigured and tested, there are limited

configuration changes that can be made compared to a customized solution from various

vendors. Finally, there is a higher cost to converged solution compared to HCI since it is a total

system that is purchased together. As converged infrastructures are rack sized solutions, they

require a larger physical footprint in a data center than HCIs, requiring greater power and cooling

requirement than HCI. Upgrades require purchasing another full block or blocks instead of

having the flexibility to upgrade individual components as nodes.

Figure 3 (Image courtesy of www.netwatch.me)


While there are fewer disadvantages with hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, since it

offers greater flexibility and scalability compared to converged infrastructure, it also has the

same configuration limitations as granular upgrades or modifications are not possible. The ability

to upgrade individual resources is also limited since computing and storage are integrated into

one hardware chassis. However, many vendors are addressing this issue by offering storage

nodes to increase data capacity only. While data deduplication and inline compression are major

features of hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, performance is also reduced when the

process is executing as additional computing and memory resources are consumed.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Solution Vendors

According to market analyst firm IDC, hyper-converged infrastructure is one of the fastest

growing and changing emerging markets (Feng, Permenter, Scaramella, 2014). The core strength

of a vendor's hyper-converged product is the solution software's ability to integrate computing,

storage, and networking hardware into a single seamless architecture that is easily scalable.

Nutanix is currently the industry leader in hyper-converged infrastructure that supports VMware

ESXi, Hyper-V, and open source KVM. Their main product is Virtual Computing Platform

(VCP) and implements a propriety file system called Nutanix Distributed Filesystem (NDFS).

NDFS allows the appliance to see all the disks as a single storage resource pool discarding the

traditional storage RAID configurations and associated limitations. Depending on the total

number of nodes in server, multiple drives and entire nodes can fail without affecting data loss

greatly increasing reliability and redundancy of the system. However, data deduplication is only

available with solid state disks. Virtual hosts outside the Nutanix storage clusters can also be

integrated and managed through NFS and SMB3 file systems allowing for seamless VM


migration into the HCI environment and replicated to Amazon or Azure public clouds. Upgrades

to vSphere and Hyper-V hypervisors and firmware upgrades to all the nodes can be

accomplished with one click from the management console. Google is currently the highest

profile customer utilizing Nutanix in their data centers (Maheshwari, 2014). The major

disadvantage of Nutanix is not offering a storage-only node. Industry average shows storage out

growing compute at the rate of 5 to 6 times. Since each Nutanix node requires a licensed

hypervisor, unless organizations migrate to open source KVM hypervisor, cost of additional

Nutanix nodes grows exponentially more expensive. A representation of HCI single pane of

glass management console is shown in figure 4 and is a screenshot of a Nutanix dashboard

display of storage and server health.

In addition to OmniCube HCI appliances, SimpliVity also offers Omnistack Accelerator cards

installed on legacy onboard PCI Express slots to manage data deduplication and compression

Figure 4 (Image courtesy of nutanix.com)


while maintaining RAID drive configurations. This allows data centers migrate to hyper-

converged infrastructure at the same time integrating existing legacy infrastructure. VM hosts on

non-HCI are still manageable through NFS shares. OmniCubes can be geographically dispersed

since only differential data is replicated between sites enabling a great level of data reliability as

well as replicating to Amazon public cloud. However, as legacy hardware does not change, the

configuration and upgrade of the vSphere hypervisor is still a manual process.

Gridstore is a Hyper-V based appliance is an all-flash solution engineered for Windows and only

supports VMware through iSCSI. All-flash drives provide consistent performance over hybrid

solutions that utilize flash drive for caching SATA drives for data storage. The advantage of

Gridstore over Nutanix is being able to run without a hypervisor on the appliance. Management

software is installed on any hardware platform and then integrated into the storage pool.

Gridstore also provides greater flexibility than Nutanix by offering dedicated storage nodes that

can be added to increase data storage capacity. Unlike Nutanix which relies on performance by

combining compute and storage in the same hardware chassis, Gridstore implements grid storage

configuration allowing for higher performance through parallel I/O and all flash storage arrays

that can be incorporated as dedicated storage nodes. However, only organizations utilizing

Hyper-V hypervisor and Azure cloud are the advantages of Gridstore realized as system backups

and disaster recovery are replicated to Azure cloud providers only (Murphy, 2015).

Nimboxx utilizes the open source KVM hypervisor freeing organizations from paying license

fees to VMware, Citrix, or Microsoft and can be deployed as a single node and scale up to

hundreds of nodes. For organizations starting to implement virtual machines, Nimboxx offers the

greatest level of flexibility as it will utilize any ratio of solid state and hard disk drives, dynamic


storage configuration, load balancing, data deduplication and thin provisioning of storage space,

backups through snapshots and replication, and built-in data encryption through single pane of

glass management software.

EVO:RAIL is software hyper-converged solution by VMware and partnered with many

hardware providers including Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, NetApp, and Super Micro

Computer (Evans, 2015). It utilizes VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) to provide distributed storage

management as well as quick deployment. The major disadvantage of EVO:RAIL is the only

supported hypervisor is VMware, and as VSAN is configured at the vSphere kernel level, it

cannot connect to virtual machines outside of the VSAN cluster. Other limitations of EVO:RAIL

include not providing data deduplication nor compression, data encryption, and public cloud

replication. Backups are either done through VMware’s Virtual Data Protection and Recovery

(VDP) add-on module to vSphere or third-party solutions such as EMC Avamar.

While not a true hyper-converged infrastructure solution, DataCore’s SANsymphony-V10 is a

direct competitor to VMware’s Virtual SAN. SANsymphony is a storage virtualization solution

that allows for the integration of flash storage arrays to an organization’s existing storage

infrastructure for scalability of up to 32 nodes, 32 petabytes of data storage, and up to 50 million

IOPS. In comparison, VSAN can only support 4.4 petabytes and up to 2 million IOPS with 32

nodes. The caching of data into working memory (DRAM) for buffering instead of solid state or

hard disk drives is key to SANsymphony’s high performance capability as well as split an

application on the block level and move higher priority blocks into flash storage, lower priority

blocks to hard disk, and archiving infrequently used blocks to public cloud storage .


SANsymphony is hypervisor agnostic as it is able to support Windows virtual machines on

VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, and Microsoft Hyper-V (NT4Admins.de, 2014).

Windows Storage Server 2012 is a Microsoft customized operating system for storage platforms.

It is an OEM-only operating system provided to manufacturers for integration into appliances for

centralized storage management supporting Hyper-V hypervisors with features such as data

deduplication and clustered-storage failovers through NAS, iSCSI, and server message block

(SMB) protocols. It is purposed designed for Hyper-V environments migrating to the cloud.

Future Trends

Storage virtualization is the future industry trend of hyper-converged infrastructure. Of the three

major components of computing, storage, and network in a virtualized environment, storage is

the most critical element as storage performance has the greatest effect on virtual machines. This

is evident by the offerings of Windows Storage Sever 2012 by Microsoft on storage platforms to

integrate with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, VMware Virtual SAN with vSphere, and

DataCore’s SANsymphony to virtualize storage through software clustering and simplify data

allocation through a central management console. The technology of clustered storage allows for

dynamic allocation of storage resources legacy SAN and NAS solutions cannot offer including

the ability integrate flash and hard drives dynamically to a storage pool through a single

management console. Clustered storage, also known as grid storage and distributed file systems,

offer critical performance increases to workstations provisioned through virtual desktop

infrastructure and databases deployed as virtual machines.

Both converged and hyper-converged infrastructures are making Software Defined Data Centers

(SDDC) possible because both solutions are able to virtualize servers, storage, and network


through a central management console, or single pane of glass management application. In

addition to the traditional offerings of IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS associated with cloud computing,

SDDC offers the next level of service as IT as a service (ITaaS). ITaaS has the implication of

being able to encompass private, hybrid, and public clouds.

On October 12, 2015, Dell announced plans to acquire EMC for $67 billion. This has major

implications for VCE as Cisco is an integral partner with Dell as a direct competitor of server

and network hardware. This future trend is a great concern to customers with continuing support

for existing VCE Vblocks integrated with Cisco UCS servers and Cisco switches as Dell plans to

integrate their own solutions into future Vblocks (Haranas, 2015).

The greatest barrier for organization from migrating into to the cloud is legacy infrastructure.

The future trend to cloud migration is eventual replacement of existing legacy siloed hardware

with software managed converged and hyper-converged computing, storage, and networking to

enable organizations to migrate seamlessly into the private and hybrid clouds.

Discussions

Organizations must consider the current state of their IT infrastructure and the lifecycle of the

hardware and incorporate the latest technology when planning for upgrades. While converged

and hyper-converged software solutions can be used to integrate existing infrastructure,

compatibility of the hardware and managing various vendors must be considered versus

complete hardware replacement. Analysis of total cost of ownership (TCO) must be analyzed

when considering upgrading data storage as support for SAN and NAS exponentially increases

after five years. Organizations must choose between complete storage infrastructure replacement,

known as forklift upgrades, or implement a new solution. The labor resources in terms of


expertise and training required to manage the various components in the data center must also be

considered. Traditionally, IT engineers must access different management consoles for servers,

storage, and network to make configuration changes and perform updates. Both converged and

hyper-converged infrastructure solutions are able offer single glass pane management of the data

center infrastructure integrating all the tasks of server deployment, network and storage

configurations, and hardware patching. The greatest advantage of converged and hyper-

converged infrastructure solutions is also the greatest concern to an organization as they are

entrusting their entire data center infrastructure to a single vendor's longevity.

Conclusion

Hyper-converged infrastructures are the foundation of future data centers. Converged solutions,

while centrally managed, are still using legacy hardware and require similar power and cooling

requirements. Converged infrastructures are cumbersome as they must be deployed by entire

blocks and are inflexible since each component in the block is static and cannot be replaced.

Hyper-converged infrastructure offers the greatest level of scalability because computing,

storage, and network are deployed as individual nodes, and thus fewer data center resources in

terms of power consumption or cooling are required. Nodes can also be deployed to other

geographical sites while remaining in the same resource pool for increase data resiliency over

legacy infrastructure. Utilizing commodity clusters and distributed storage with hyper-converged

infrastructure offers the most flexible and highest performing solution over legacy systems.

Hyper-converged infrastructure solutions simplify the managing of a complex data center

environment by virtualizing servers, storage, and networking through a single management

console allowing organizations to effectively streamline their engineering staff and reduce

training requirements. Troubleshooting is greatly simplified as the entire infrastructure stack is


supplied by a single vendor. When organizations analyze the total cost of ownership of

maintaining legacy silo components of computing, storage, and network, hyper-converged

infrastructure solutions offer the best return on investment. Hyper-converged infrastructure is an

organization’s answer to the highest performance, most reliable, and simplest solution possible

for their virtualized environment.


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Exploring HCI