FlexPod Datacenter with VMware Horizon View 7.3 and VMware vSphere 6.5 Update 1 with Cisco UCS Manager 3.2 for 5000 Seats
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FlexPod Datacenter with VMware Horizon View 7.3 and VMware vSphere 6.5 Update 1 with Cisco UCS Manager 3.2 for 5000 Seats
Cisco Validated Design for a 5000 Seat Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Built on Cisco UCS B200 M5 and Cisco UCS Manager 3.2 with NetApp AFF A-Series on VMware Horizon View 7.3 and VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5 Update 1 Hypervisor Platform
Last Updated: January 2, 2018
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Table of Contents
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions: Data Center
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Focus
Cisco Unified Computing System
Cisco Unified Computing System Components
Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Server
Cisco UCS VIC1340 Converged Network Adapter
Cisco MDS 9148S Fiber Channel Switch
Advantages of Using VMware Horizon
What are VMware RDS Hosted Sessions?
Farms, RDS Hosts, and Desktop and Application Pools
Horizon Connection Server Enhanced Features
Supported Windows 10 Operating Systems
Desktop Virtualization Design Fundamentals
VMware Horizon Design Fundamentals
Horizon VDI Pool and RDSH Servers Pool
NetApp Storage Virtual Machine (SVM)
Architecture and Design Considerations for Desktop Virtualization
Understanding Applications and Data
Project Planning and Solution Sizing Sample Questions
Designing a VMware Horizon Environment for a Mixed Workload
Solution Hardware and Software
Configuration Topology for Scalable VMware Horizon Mixed Workload
Cisco Unified Computing System Base Configuration
Cisco UCS Manager Software Version 3.2(1d)
Configure Fabric Interconnects at Console
Base Cisco UCS System Configuration
Set Fabric Interconnects to Fibre Channel End Host Mode
Configure Fibre Channel Uplink Ports
Enable Server and Ethernet Uplink Ports
Create Uplink Port Channels to Cisco Nexus 9372PX Switches
Create Uplink Port Channels to Cisco MDS 9148S Switches
Create Required Shared Resource Pools
Set Jumbo Frames in Cisco UCS Fabric
Create Network Control Policy for Cisco Discovery Protocol
Cisco UCS System Configuration for Cisco UCS B-Series
NetApp A300 Storage System Configuration
NetApp All Flash FAS A300 Controllers
Complete Configuration Worksheet
Set Onboard Unified Target Adapter 2 Port Personality
Set Auto-Revert on Cluster Management
Set Up Management Broadcast Domain
Set Up Service Processor Network Interface
Disable Flow Control on 10GbE and 40GbE Ports
Disable Unused FCoE Capability on CNA Ports
Configure Network Time Protocol
Configure Simple Network Management Protocol
Enable Cisco Discovery Protocol
Create Jumbo Frame MTU Broadcast Domains in ONTAP
Create Storage Virtual Machine
Create Load-Sharing Mirrors of SVM Root Volume
Create Block Protocol (FC) Service
Add Infrastructure SVM Administrator
NetApp A300 Storage Configuration
Network Port Interface Group Settings
Network Port Broadcast Domains
NAS Logical Interface Settings
FCP Logical Interface Settings
Storage Efficiency and Space Management
Installing and Configuring VMware ESXi 6.5
Install and Configure VMware vCenter Appliance
Building the Virtual Machines and Environment for Workload Testing
Software Infrastructure Configuration
Installing and Configuring VMware Horizon Environment
VMware Horizon Connection Server Configuration
Horizon VMware Replica Server Creation
Install VMware Horizon Composer Server
Create the Golden Image for VMware Horizon RDS Deployment
Create the Golden Image for Horizon Linked Clone Desktops
VMware Horizon Agent Installation
VMware Horizon Desktop Pool Creation
Configuring User Profile Management
Cisco UCS Configuration for Cluster Testing
Cisco UCS Configuration for Full Scale Testing
Testing Methodology and Success Criteria
Pre-Test Setup for Single and Multi-Blade Testing
Server-Side Response Time Measurements
Single-Server Recommended Maximum Workload Persistent Testing
Single-Server Recommended Maximum Workload Testing
Single-Server Recommended Maximum Workload for RDS Persistent Hosted Server Sessions: 285 Users
Single-Server Recommended Maximum Workload for VDI Persistent and Non-Persistent with 210 Users
Cluster Workload Testing with 1680 Persistent RDS Users
Performance Data from One RDSH Server: 1680 Users RDSH Sessions Cluster Testing
Cluster Workload Testing with 1660 Persistent and Non-Persistent VDI Instant Desktop Users
Full Scale Mixed Workload Testing with 5000 Users
RDSH Server Performance Monitor Data for One Sample RDSH Server: 5000 Users Mixed Scale Testing
Full Clone VDI Host ESXTOP Charts
Storage Graphs for 5000 Users Mixed Workload Test
AFF A300 Storage Detailed Test Results for Cluster Scalability Test
AFF A300 Storage Test Results for 1680 RDS Windows 2016 Sessions
1660 Users VDI Instant Clones Cluster Test
NetApp AFF A300 Test Results for 1660 Non-Persistent Windows 10 x64 VMware Horizon Desktops
1660 Users VDI Persistent Clones Cluster Test
NetApp AFF A300 Test Results for 1660 Persistent Windows 10x64 VMware Horizon Desktops
NetApp AFF A300 Storage Test Results for 5000 User Full Scale, Mixed Workload Scalability
Scalability Considerations and Guidelines
Scalability of VMware Horizon 7 Configuration
Get More Business Value with Services
Cisco UCS Manager Configuration Guides
Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Cards
Cisco Nexus Switching References
Cisco MDS 9000 Service Switch References
Appendix A – Cisco Nexus Ethernet and MDS Fibre Channel Switch Configurations
Ethernet Network Configuration
Cisco Nexus 9372PX-A Configuration
Cisco Nexus 9172PX-B Configuration
Fibre Channel Network Configuration
Cisco MDS 9148S-A Configuration
Cisco MDS 9148S-B Configuration
Mixed Workload All 3 Clusters as Scale Test
VDI Host Metrics for 5000 Users Scale Test
NETAPP AFF A300 Storage Charts for 5000 Users Scale Test
Cisco® Validated Designs include systems and solutions that are designed, tested, and documented to facilitate and improve customer deployments. These designs incorporate a wide range of technologies and products into a portfolio of solutions that have been developed to address the business needs of customers. Cisco, NetApp and VMware have partnered to deliver this document, which serves as a specific step by step guide for implementing this solution. This Cisco Validated Design provides an efficient architectural design that is based on customer requirements. The solution that follows is a validated approach for deploying Cisco, NetApp and VMware technologies as a shared, high performance, resilient, virtual desktop infrastructure.
This document provides a reference architecture, design guide, and deployment for up to a 5000 seat mixed workload end user computing environment on FlexPod Datacenter with Cisco UCS and NetApp® All Flash FAS (AFF) A300 storage. The solution includes VMware Horizon server-based Remote Desktop Sever Hosted sessions, VMware Horizon persistent Microsoft Windows 10 virtual desktops and VMware Horizon non-persistent Microsoft Windows 10 instant clone virtual desktops on VMware vSphere 6.5.
The solution is a predesigned, best-practice data center architecture built on the FlexPod reference architecture. The FlexPod Datacenter used in this validation includes Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), the Cisco Nexus® 9000 family of switches, Cisco MDS 9000 family of Fibre Channel (FC) switches and a NetApp AFF A300 system.
This solution is 100 percent virtualized on fifth generation Cisco UCS B200 M5 blade servers, booting VMware vSphere 6.5 Update 1 through FC SAN from the AFF A300 storage array. The virtual desktop sessions are powered by VMware Horizon 7. VMware Horizon Remote Desktop Server Hosted Sessions (1680 RDS Server sessions) and 1660 VMware Horizon Instant and 1660 Full Clones Window 10 desktops (3320 virtual desktops) were provisioned on the AFF A300 storage array. Where applicable the document provides best practice recommendations and sizing guidelines for customer deployment of this solution.
This solution delivers the design 5000 user payload with five fewer blade servers than previous 5000 seat solutions on fourth generation Cisco UCS Blade Servers making it more efficient and cost effective in the data center.
The solution provides outstanding virtual desktop end user experience as measured by the Login VSI 4.1.25.6 Knowledge Worker workload running in benchmark mode.
The 5000-seat solution provides a large-scale building block that can be replicated to confidently scale-out to tens of thousands of users.
Introduction
The current industry trend in data center design is towards shared infrastructures. By using virtualization along with pre-validated IT platforms, enterprise customers have embarked on the journey to the cloud by moving away from application silos and toward shared infrastructure that can be quickly deployed, thereby increasing agility and reducing costs. Cisco, NetApp storage, and VMware have partnered to deliver this Cisco Validated Design, which uses best of breed storage, server and network components to serve as the foundation for desktop virtualization workloads, enabling efficient architectural designs that can be quickly and confidently deployed.
Audience
The audience for this document includes, but is not limited to; sales engineers, field consultants, professional services, IT managers, partner engineers, and customers who want to take advantage of an infrastructure built to deliver IT efficiency and enable IT innovation.
Purpose of this Document
This document provides a step-by-step design, configuration and implementation guide for the Cisco Validated Design for a large-scale VMware Horizon 7 mixed workload solution with NetApp AFF A300, Cisco UCS Blade Servers, Cisco Nexus 9000 series ethernet switches and Cisco MDS 9000 series fibre channel switches.
What’s New?
This is the first VMware Horizon desktop virtualization Cisco Validated Design with Cisco UCS 5th generation servers and a NetApp AFF A-Series system.
It incorporates the following features:
· Cisco UCS B200 M5 blade servers with Intel Xeon Scalable Family processors and 2666 MHz memory
· Validation of Cisco Nexus 9000 with NetApp AFF A300 system
· Validation of Cisco MDS 9000 with NetApp AFF A300 system
· Support for the Cisco UCS 3.2(1d) release and Cisco UCS B200-M5 servers
· Support for the latest release of NetApp AFF A300 hardware and NetApp ONTAP® 9.1
· A Fibre Channel storage design supporting SAN LUNs
· Cisco UCS Inband KVM Access
· Cisco UCS vMedia client for vSphere Installation
· Cisco UCS Firmware Auto Sync Server policy
· VMware vSphere 6.5 U1 Hypervisor
· VMware Horizon 7 Server 2016 RDS Hosted server sessions
· VMware Horizon 7 non-persistent Instant Clone Windows 10 virtual machines
· VMware Horizon 7 persistent Full Clones Windows 10 virtual machines
· The data center market segment is shifting toward heavily virtualized private, hybrid and public cloud computing models running on industry-standard systems. These environments require uniform design points that can be repeated for ease of management and scalability.
These factors have led to the need for predesigned computing, networking and storage building blocks optimized to lower the initial design cost, simplify management, and enable horizontal scalability and high levels of utilization.
The use cases include:
· Enterprise Datacenter
· Service Provider Datacenter
· Large Commercial Datacenter
This Cisco Validated Design prescribes a defined set of hardware and software that serves as an integrated foundation for both VMware Horizon RDSH server desktop sessions based on Microsoft Server 2016, VMware Horizon VDI persistent virtual machines and VMware Horizon VDI non–persistent virtual machines based on Windows 10 operating system.
The mixed workload solution includes NetApp AFF A300 storage, Cisco Nexus® and MDS networking, the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS®), VMware Horizon and VMware vSphere software in a single package. The design is space optimized such that the network, compute, and storage required can be housed in one data center rack. Switch port density enables the networking components to accommodate multiple compute and storage configurations of this kind.
The infrastructure is deployed to provide Fibre Channel-booted hosts with block-level access to shared storage. The reference architecture reinforces the "wire-once" strategy, because as additional storage is added to the architecture, no re-cabling is required from the hosts to the Cisco UCS fabric interconnect.
The combination of technologies from Cisco Systems, Inc., NetApp Inc. and VMware Inc. produced a highly efficient, robust and affordable desktop virtualization solution for a hosted virtual desktop and hosted shared desktop mixed deployment supporting different use cases. Key components of the solution include the following:
· More power, same size. Cisco UCS B200 M5 half-width blade with dual 18-core 2.3 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Gold (6140) processors and 768 GB of memory for VMware Horizon Desktop hosts supports more virtual desktop workloads than the previously released generation processors on the same hardware. The Intel 18-core 2.3 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Gold (6140) processors used in this study provided a balance between increased per-blade capacity and cost.
· Fewer servers. Because of the increased compute power in the Cisco UCS B200 M5 servers, we supported the 5000 seat design with 16% fewer servers compared to previous generation B200 M4s.
· Fault-tolerance with high availability built into the design. The various designs are based on using one Unified Computing System chassis with multiple Cisco UCS B200 M5 blades for virtualized desktop and infrastructure workloads. The design provides N+1 server fault tolerance for hosted virtual desktops, hosted shared desktops and infrastructure services.
· Stress-tested to the limits during aggressive boot scenario. The 5000-user mixed RDS hosted virtual sessions and VDI pooled shared desktop environment booted and registered with the VMware Horizon 7 Administrator in under 20 minutes, providing our customers with an extremely fast, reliable cold-start desktop virtualization system.
· Stress-tested to the limits during simulated login storms. All 5000 simulated users logged in and started running workloads up to steady state in 48-minutes without overwhelming the processors, exhausting memory or exhausting the storage subsystems, providing customers with a desktop virtualization system that can easily handle the most demanding login and startup storms.
· Ultra-condensed computing for the datacenter. The rack space required to support the system is less than a single 42U rack, conserving valuable data center floor space.
· All Virtualized: This Cisco Validated Design (CVD) presents a validated design that is 100 percent virtualized on VMware ESXi 6.5. All of the virtual desktops, user data, profiles, and supporting infrastructure components, including Active Directory, Provisioning Servers, SQL Servers, VMware Horizon Connection Servers, VMware Horizon Composer Server, VMware Horizon Replica Servers, VMware Horizon Remote Desktop Server Hosted sessions and VDI virtual machine desktops. This provides customers with complete flexibility for maintenance and capacity additions because the entire system runs on the FlexPod converged infrastructure with stateless Cisco UCS Blade servers and NetApp FC storage.
· Cisco maintains industry leadership with the new Cisco UCS Manager 3.2(1d) software that simplifies scaling, guarantees consistency, and eases maintenance. Cisco’s ongoing development efforts with Cisco UCS Manager, Cisco UCS Central, and Cisco UCS Director insure that customer environments are consistent locally, across Cisco UCS Domains and across the globe, our software suite offers increasingly simplified operational and deployment management and it continues to widen the span of control for customer organizations’ subject matter experts in compute, storage and network.
· Our 40G unified fabric story gets additional validation on Cisco UCS 6300 Series Fabric Interconnects as Cisco runs more challenging workload testing, while maintaining unsurpassed user response times.
· NetApp AFF A300 array provides industry-leading storage solutions that efficiently handle the most demanding I/O bursts (for example, login storms), profile management, and user data management, deliver simple and flexible business continuance, and help reduce storage cost per desktop.
· NetApp AFF A300 array provides a simple to understand storage architecture for hosting all user data components (VMs, profiles, user data) on the same storage array.
· NetApp clustered Data ONTAP software enables to seamlessly add, upgrade or remove storage from the infrastructure to meet the needs of the virtual desktops.
· NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) for VMware vSphere hypervisor has deep integrations with vSphere, providing easy-button automation for key storage tasks such as storage repository provisioning, storage resize, data deduplication, directly from vCenter.
· VMware Horizon 7. Latest and greatest virtual desktop and application product. VMware Horizon 7 follows a new unified product architecture that supports both hosted-shared desktops and applications (RDS) and complete virtual desktops (VDI). This new VMware Horizon release simplifies tasks associated with large-scale VDI management. This modular solution supports seamless delivery of Windows apps and desktops as the number of users increase. In addition, Horizon enhancements help to optimize performance and improve the user experience across a variety of endpoint device types, from workstations to mobile devices including laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
· Optimized to achieve the best possible performance and scale. For hosted shared desktop sessions, the best performance was achieved when the number of vCPUs assigned to the VMware 7 RDS virtual machines did not exceed the number of hyper-threaded (logical) cores available on the server. In other words, maximum performance is obtained when not overcommitting the CPU resources for the virtual machines running virtualized RDS systems.
· Provisioning desktop machines made easy. Remote Desktop Server Hosted (RDSH) shared virtual machines and VMware Horizon 7, Microsoft Windows 10 virtual machines were created for this solution using VMware Instant and Composer pooled desktops.
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions: Data Center
The Evolving Workplace
Today’s IT departments are facing a rapidly evolving workplace environment. The workforce is becoming increasingly diverse and geographically dispersed, including offshore contractors, distributed call center operations, knowledge and task workers, partners, consultants, and executives connecting from locations around the world at all times.
This workforce is also increasingly mobile, conducting business in traditional offices, conference rooms across the enterprise campus, home offices, on the road, in hotels, and at the local coffee shop. This workforce wants to use a growing array of client computing and mobile devices that they can choose based on personal preference. These trends are increasing pressure on IT to ensure protection of corporate data and prevent data leakage or loss through any combination of user, endpoint device, and desktop access scenarios (Figure 1).
These challenges are compounded by desktop refresh cycles to accommodate aging PCs and bounded local storage and migration to new operating systems, specifically Microsoft Windows 10 and productivity tools, specifically Microsoft Office 2016.
Figure 1 Cisco Data Center Partner Collaboration
Some of the key drivers for desktop virtualization are increased data security and reduced TCO through increased control and reduced management costs.
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Focus
Cisco focuses on three key elements to deliver the best desktop virtualization data center infrastructure: simplification, security, and scalability. The software combined with platform modularity provides a simplified, secure, and scalable desktop virtualization platform.
Simplified
Cisco UCS provides a radical new approach to industry-standard computing and provides the core of the data center infrastructure for desktop virtualization. Among the many features and benefits of Cisco UCS are the drastic reduction in the number of servers needed and in the number of cables used per server, and the capability to rapidly deploy or reprovision servers through Cisco UCS service profiles. With fewer servers and cables to manage and with streamlined server and virtual desktop provisioning, operations are significantly simplified. Thousands of desktops can be provisioned in minutes with Cisco UCS Manager service profiles and Cisco storage partners’ storage-based cloning. This approach accelerates the time to productivity for end users, improves business agility, and allows IT resources to be allocated to other tasks.
Cisco UCS Manager (UCSM) automates many mundane, error-prone data center operations such as configuration and provisioning of server, network, and storage access infrastructure. In addition, Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers and C-Series Rack Servers with large memory footprints enable high desktop density that helps reduce server infrastructure requirements.
Simplification also leads to more successful desktop virtualization implementation. Cisco and its technology partners like VMware Technologies and NetApp have developed integrated, validated architectures, including predefined converged architecture infrastructure packages such as FlexPod. Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions have been tested with VMware vSphere, VMware Horizon.
Secure
Although virtual desktops are inherently more secure than their physical predecessors, they introduce new security challenges. Mission-critical web and application servers using a common infrastructure such as virtual desktops are now at a higher risk for security threats. Inter–virtual machine traffic now poses an important security consideration that IT managers need to address, especially in dynamic environments in which virtual machines, using VMware vMotion, move across the server infrastructure.
Desktop virtualization, therefore, significantly increases the need for virtual machine–level awareness of policy and security, especially given the dynamic and fluid nature of virtual machine mobility across an extended computing infrastructure. The ease with which new virtual desktops can proliferate magnifies the importance of a virtualization-aware network and security infrastructure. Cisco data center infrastructure (Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus Family solutions) for desktop virtualization provides strong data center, network, and desktop security, with comprehensive security from the desktop to the hypervisor. Security is enhanced with segmentation of virtual desktops, virtual machine–aware policies and administration, and network security across the LAN and WAN infrastructure.
Scalable
Growth of a desktop virtualization solution is all but inevitable, so a solution must be able to scale, and scale predictably, with that growth. The Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions built on FlexPod Datacenter infrastructure supports high virtual-desktop density (desktops per server), and additional servers and storage scale with near-linear performance. FlexPod Datacenter provides a flexible platform for growth and improves business agility. Cisco UCS Manager service profiles allow on-demand desktop provisioning and make it just as easy to deploy dozens of desktops as it is to deploy thousands of desktops.
Cisco UCS servers provide near-linear performance and scale. Cisco UCS implements the patented Cisco Extended Memory Technology to offer large memory footprints with fewer sockets (with scalability to up to 1 terabyte (TB) of memory with 2- and 4-socket servers). Using unified fabric technology as a building block, Cisco UCS server aggregate bandwidth can scale to up to 80 Gbps per server, and the northbound Cisco UCS fabric interconnect can output 2 terabits per second (Tbps) at line rate, helping prevent desktop virtualization I/O and memory bottlenecks. Cisco UCS, with its high-performance, low-latency unified fabric-based networking architecture, supports high volumes of virtual desktop traffic, including high-resolution video and communications traffic. In addition, Cisco storage partners NetApp help maintain data availability and optimal performance during boot and login storms as part of the Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions. Recent Cisco Validated Designs for End User Computing based on FlexPod solutions have demonstrated scalability and performance, with up to 5000 desktops up and running in 20 minutes.
FlexPod Datacenter provides an excellent platform for growth, with transparent scaling of server, network, and storage resources to support desktop virtualization, data center applications, and cloud computing.
Savings and Success
The simplified, secure, scalable Cisco data center infrastructure for desktop virtualization solutions saves time and money compared to alternative approaches. Cisco UCS enables faster payback and ongoing savings (better ROI and lower TCO) and provides the industry’s greatest virtual desktop density per server, reducing both capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx). The Cisco UCS architecture and Cisco Unified Fabric also enables much lower network infrastructure costs, with fewer cables per server and fewer ports required. In addition, storage tiering and deduplication technologies decrease storage costs, reducing desktop storage needs by up to 50 percent.
The simplified deployment of Cisco UCS for desktop virtualization accelerates the time to productivity and enhances business agility. IT staff and end users are more productive more quickly, and the business can respond to new opportunities quickly by deploying virtual desktops whenever and wherever they are needed. The high-performance Cisco systems and network deliver a near-native end-user experience, allowing users to be productive anytime and anywhere.
The ultimate measure of desktop virtualization for any organization is its efficiency and effectiveness in both the near term and the long term. The Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions are very efficient, allowing rapid deployment, requiring fewer devices and cables, and reducing costs. The solutions are also very effective, providing the services that end users need on their devices of choice while improving IT operations, control, and data security. Success is bolstered through Cisco’s best-in-class partnerships with leaders in virtualization and storage, and through tested and validated designs and services to help customers throughout the solution lifecycle. Long-term success is enabled through the use of Cisco’s scalable, flexible, and secure architecture as the platform for desktop virtualization.
Physical Topology
Figure 2 illustrates the physical architecture.
Figure 2 Physical Architecture
The reference hardware configuration includes:
· Two Cisco Nexus 9372PX switches
· Two Cisco MDS 9148S 16GB Fibre Channel switches
· Two Cisco UCS 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnects
· Four Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Chassis
· Two Cisco UCS B200 M4 Blade Servers (2 Infra Server hosting Infrastructure VMs)
· 25 Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Servers (25 servers for workload)
· One NetApp AFF A300 Storage System
· One NetApp DS224C Disk Shelf
For desktop virtualization, the deployment includes VMware Horizon 7 running on VMware vSphere 6.5.
The design is intended to provide a large-scale building block for both VMware Horizon RDS Hosted server sessions and Windows 10 non-persistent and persistent VDI desktops in the following ratio:
· 1680 Remote Desktop Server Hosted (RDSH) desktop sessions
· 1660 VMware Horizon Windows 10 non-persistent virtual desktops
· 1660 VMware Horizon Windows 10 persistent virtual desktops
The data provided in this document will allow our customers to adjust the mix of RDSH and VDI desktops to suite their environment. For example, additional blade servers and chassis can be deployed to increase compute capacity, additional disk shelves can be deployed to improve I/O capability and throughput, and special hardware or software features can be added to introduce new features. This document guides you through the detailed steps for deploying the base architecture. This procedure covers everything from physical cabling to network, compute and storage device configurations.
Configuration Guidelines
This Cisco Validated Design provides details for deploying a fully redundant, highly available 5000 seat mixed workload virtual desktop solution with VMware on a FlexPod Datacenter architecture. Configuration guidelines are provided that refer the reader to which redundant component is being configured with each step. For example, storage controller 01and storage controller 02 are used to identify the two AFF A300 storage controllers that are provisioned with this document, Cisco Nexus A or Cisco Nexus B identifies the pair of Cisco Nexus switches that are configured and Cisco MDS A or Cisco MDS B identifies the pair of Cisco MDS switches that are configured.
The Cisco UCS 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnects are similarly configured. Additionally, this document details the steps for provisioning multiple Cisco UCS hosts, and these are identified sequentially: VM-Host-Infra-01, VM-Host-Infra-02, VM-Host-RDSH-01, VM-Host-VDI-01 and so on. Finally, to indicate that you should include information pertinent to your environment in a given step, <text> appears as part of the command structure.
This section describes the components used in the solution outlined in this study.
What is FlexPod?
FlexPod is a best practice data center architecture that includes the following components:
· Cisco Unified Computing System
· Cisco Nexus switches
· Cisco MDS switches
· NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) systems
Figure 3 FlexPod Component Families
These components are connected and configured according to the best practices of both Cisco and NetApp to provide an ideal platform for running a variety of enterprise workloads with confidence. FlexPod can scale up for greater performance and capacity (adding compute, network, or storage resources individually as needed), or it can scale out for environments that require multiple consistent deployments (such as rolling out of additional FlexPod stacks). The reference architecture covered in this document leverages Cisco Nexus 9000 for the network switching element and pulls in the Cisco MDS 9000 for the SAN switching component.
One of the key benefits of FlexPod is its ability to maintain consistency during scale. Each of the component families shown (Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, and NetApp AFF) offers platform and resource options to scale the infrastructure up or down, while supporting the same features and functionality that are required under the configuration and connectivity best practices of FlexPod.
Why FlexPod?
The following lists the benefits of FlexPod:
· Consistent Performance and Scalability
- Consistent sub-millisecond latency with 100% flash storage
- Consolidate 100’s of enterprise-class applications in a single rack
- Scales easily, without disruption
- Continuous growth through multiple FlexPod CI deployments
· Operational Simplicity
- Fully tested, validated, and documented for rapid deployment
- Reduced management complexity
- Auto-aligned 512B architecture removes storage alignment issues
- No storage tuning or tiers necessary
· Lowest TCO
- Dramatic savings in power, cooling, and space with 100 percent Flash
- Industry leading data reduction
· Enterprise-Grade Resiliency
- Highly available architecture with no single point of failure
- Nondisruptive operations with no downtime
- Upgrade and expand without downtime or performance loss
- Native data protection: snapshots and replication
- Suitable for even large resource-intensive workloads such as real-time analytics or heavy transactional databases
Cisco Unified Computing System
Cisco UCS Manager provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components of the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS) through an intuitive GUI, a command-line interface (CLI), and an XML API. The manager provides a unified management domain with centralized management capabilities and can control multiple chassis and thousands of virtual machines.
Cisco UCS is a next-generation data center platform that unites computing, networking, and storage access. The platform, optimized for virtual environments, is designed using open industry-standard technologies and aims to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility. The system integrates a low-latency; lossless 40 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers. It is an integrated, scalable, multi-chassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain.
Cisco Unified Computing System Components
The main components of Cisco UCS are:
· Compute: The system is based on an entirely new class of computing system that incorporates blade servers based on Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600/4600 v3 and E7-2800 v3 family CPUs.
· Network: The system is integrated on a low-latency, lossless, 40-Gbps unified network fabric. This network foundation consolidates LANs, SANs, and high-performance computing (HPC) networks, which are separate networks today. The unified fabric lowers costs by reducing the number of network adapters, switches, and cables needed, and by decreasing the power and cooling requirements.
· Virtualization: The system unleashes the full potential of virtualization by enhancing the scalability, performance, and operational control of virtual environments. Cisco security, policy enforcement, and diagnostic features are now extended into virtualized environments to better support changing business and IT requirements.
· Storage access: The system provides consolidated access to local storage, SAN storage, and network-attached storage (NAS) over the unified fabric. With storage access unified, Cisco UCS can access storage over Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Small Computer System Interface over IP (iSCSI) protocols. This capability provides customers with choice for storage access and investment protection. In addition, server administrators can preassign storage-access policies for system connectivity to storage resources, simplifying storage connectivity and management and helping increase productivity.
· Management: Cisco UCS uniquely integrates all system components, enabling the entire solution to be managed as a single entity by Cisco UCS Manager. The manager has an intuitive GUI, a CLI, and a robust API for managing all system configuration processes and operations.
Figure 4 Cisco Data Center Overview
Cisco UCS is designed to deliver:
· Reduced TCO and increased business agility
· Increased IT staff productivity through just-in-time provisioning and mobility support
· A cohesive, integrated system that unifies the technology in the data center; the system is managed, serviced, and tested as a whole
· Scalability through a design for hundreds of discrete servers and thousands of virtual machines and the capability to scale I/O bandwidth to match demand
· Industry standards supported by a partner ecosystem of industry leaders
Cisco UCS Manager provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components of the Cisco Unified Computing System across multiple chassis, rack servers, and thousands of virtual machines. Cisco UCS Manager manages Cisco UCS as a single entity through an intuitive GUI, a command-line interface (CLI), or an XML API for comprehensive access to all Cisco UCS Manager Functions.
Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect
The Cisco UCS 6300 Series Fabric Interconnects are a core part of Cisco UCS, providing both network connectivity and management capabilities for the system. The Cisco UCS 6300 Series offers line-rate, low-latency, lossless 40 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE, and Fibre Channel functions.
The fabric interconnects provide the management and communication backbone for the Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers and Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis. All chassis, and therefore all blades, attached to the fabric interconnects become part of a single, highly available management domain. In addition, by supporting unified fabric, the Cisco UCS 6300 Series provides both LAN and SAN connectivity for all blades in the domain.
For networking, the Cisco UCS 6300 Series uses a cut-through architecture, supporting deterministic, low-latency, line-rate 40 Gigabit Ethernet on all ports, 2.4 plus terabit (Tb) switching capacity, and 320 Gbps of bandwidth per chassis IOM, independent of packet size and enabled services. The product series supports Cisco low-latency, lossless, 40 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric capabilities, increasing the reliability, efficiency, and scalability of Ethernet networks. The fabric interconnects support multiple traffic classes over a lossless Ethernet fabric, from the blade server through the interconnect. Significant TCO savings come from an FCoE-optimized server design in which network interface cards (NICs), host bus adapters (HBAs), cables, and switches can be consolidated.
Figure 5 Cisco UCS 6300 Series Fabric Interconnect
Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Server
The Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Server (Figure 6 and Figure 7) is a density-optimized, half-width blade server that supports two CPU sockets for Intel Xeon processor 6140 Gold series CPUs and up to 24 DDR4 DIMMs. It supports one modular LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) dedicated slot for a Cisco virtual interface card (VIC) and one mezzanine adapter. In additions, the Cisco UCS B200 M5 supports an optional storage module that accommodates up to two SAS or SATA hard disk drives (HDDs) or solid-state disk (SSD) drives. You can install up to eight Cisco UCS B200 M5 servers in a chassis, mixing them with other models of Cisco UCS blade servers in the chassis if desired. Latest features of Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Cards (VICs)
Figure 6 Cisco UCS B200 M5 Front View
Figure 7 Cisco UCS B200 M5 Back View
Cisco UCS combines Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers and C-Series Rack Servers with networking and storage access into a single converged system with simplified management, greater cost efficiency and agility, and increased visibility and control. The Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Server is one of the newest servers in the Cisco UCS portfolio.
The Cisco UCS B200 M5 delivers performance, flexibility, and optimization for data centers and remote sites. This enterprise-class server offers market-leading performance, versatility, and density without compromise for workloads ranging from web infrastructure to distributed databases. The Cisco UCS B200 M5 can quickly deploy stateless physical and virtual workloads with the programmable ease of use of the Cisco UCS Manager software and simplified server access with Cisco® Single Connect technology. Based on the Intel Xeon processor 6140 Gold product family, it offers up to 3 TB of memory using 128GB DIMMs, up to two disk drives, and up to 320 Gbps of I/O throughput. The Cisco UCS B200 M5 offers exceptional levels of performance, flexibility, and I/O throughput to run your most demanding applications.
In addition, Cisco UCS has the architectural advantage of not having to power and cool excess switches, NICs, and HBAs in each blade server chassis. With a larger power budget per blade server, it provides uncompromised expandability and capabilities, as in the new Cisco UCS B200 M5 server with its leading memory-slot capacity and drive capacity.
Product Overview
The Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Server delivers performance, flexibility, and optimization for deployments in data centers, in the cloud, and at remote sites. This enterprise-class server offers market-leading performance, versatility, and density without compromise for workloads including Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), web infrastructure, distributed databases, converged infrastructure, and enterprise applications such as Oracle and SAP HANA. The Cisco UCS B200 M5 server can quickly deploy stateless physical and virtual workloads through programmable, easy-to-use Cisco UCS Manager software and simplified server access through Cisco SingleConnect technology. It includes:
· Latest Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with up to 28 cores per socket
· Up to 24 DDR4 DIMMs for improved performance
· Intel 3D XPoint-ready support, with built-in support for next-generation nonvolatile memory technology
· Two GPUs
· Two Small-Form-Factor (SFF) drives
· Two Secure Digital (SD) cards or M.2 SATA drives
· Up to 80 Gbps of I/O throughput
Main Features
The Cisco UCS B200 M5 server is a half-width blade. Up to eight servers can reside in the 6-Rack-Unit (6RU) Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis, offering one of the highest densities of servers per rack unit of blade chassis in the industry. You can configure the Cisco UCS B200 M5 to meet your local storage requirements without having to buy, power, and cool components that you do not need.
The Cisco UCS B200 M5 provides these main features:
· Up to two Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs with up to 28 cores per CPU
· 24 DIMM slots for industry-standard DDR4 memory at speeds up to 2666 MHz, with up to 3 TB of total memory when using 128-GB DIMMs
· Modular LAN On Motherboard (mLOM) card with Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1340, a 2-port, 40 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)–capable mLOM mezzanine adapter
· Optional rear mezzanine VIC with two 40-Gbps unified I/O ports or two sets of 4 x 10-Gbps unified I/O ports, delivering 80 Gbps to the server; adapts to either 10- or 40-Gbps fabric connections
· Two optional, hot-pluggable, hard-disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), or NVMe 2.5-inch drives with a choice of enterprise-class RAID or passthrough controllers
· Cisco FlexStorage local drive storage subsystem, which provides flexible boot and local storage capabilities and allows you to boot from dual, mirrored SD cards
· Support for up to two optional GPUs
· Support for up to one rear storage mezzanine card
Table 1 Product Specifications
Table 2 System Requirements
Table 3 Ordering Information
Table 4 Capabilities and Features
For detailed information, refer to the Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Server Spec Sheet and the Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Server Data Sheet.
Cisco UCS VIC1340 Converged Network Adapter
The Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1340 (Figure 8) is a 2-port 40-Gbps Ethernet or dual 4 x 10-Gbps Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)-capable modular LAN on motherboard (mLOM) designed exclusively for the M5 generation of Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers. When used in combination with an optional port expander, the Cisco UCS VIC 1340 capabilities is enabled for two ports of 40-Gbps Ethernet.
The Cisco UCS VIC 1340 enables a policy-based, stateless, agile server infrastructure that can present over 256 PCIe standards-compliant interfaces to the host that can be dynamically configured as either network interface cards (NICs) or host bus adapters (HBAs). In addition, the Cisco UCS VIC 1340 supports Cisco® Data Center Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) technology, which extends the Cisco UCS fabric interconnect ports to virtual machines, simplifying server virtualization deployment and management.
Figure 9 illustrates the Cisco UCS VIC 1340 Virtual Interface Cards Deployed in the Cisco UCS B-Series B200 M5 Blade Servers.
Figure 9 Cisco UCS VIC 1340 Deployed in the Cisco UCS B200 M5
Cisco Switching
Cisco Nexus 9372PX Switches
The Cisco Nexus 9372PX/9372PX-E Switches have 48 1/10-Gbps Small Form Pluggable Plus (SFP+) ports and 6 Quad SFP+ (QSFP+) uplink ports. All the ports are line rate, delivering 1.44 Tbps of throughput in a 1-rack-unit (1RU) form factor. Cisco Nexus 9372PX benefits are listed below.
Architectural Flexibility
· Includes top-of-rack or middle-of-row fiber-based server access connectivity for traditional and leaf-spine architectures
· Leaf node support for Cisco ACI architecture is provided in the roadmap
· Increase scale and simplify management through Cisco Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender support
Feature Rich
· Enhanced Cisco NX-OS Software is designed for performance, resiliency, scalability, manageability, and programmability
· ACI-ready infrastructure helps users take advantage of automated policy-based systems management
· Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) routing provides network services
· Cisco Nexus 9372PX-E supports IP-based endpoint group (EPG) classification in ACI mode
Highly Available and Efficient Design
· High-density, non-blocking architecture
· Easily deployed into either a hot-aisle and cold-aisle configuration
· Redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and fan trays
Simplified Operations
· Power-On Auto Provisioning (POAP) support allows for simplified software upgrades and configuration file installation
· An intelligent API offers switch management through remote procedure calls (RPCs, JSON, or XML) over a HTTP/HTTPS infrastructure
· Python Scripting for programmatic access to the switch command-line interface (CLI)
· Hot and cold patching, and online diagnostics
Investment Protection
A Cisco 40 Gb bidirectional transceiver allows reuse of an existing 10 Gigabit Ethernet multimode cabling plant for 40 Gigabit Ethernet Support for 1 Gb and 10 Gb access connectivity for data centers migrating access switching infrastructure to faster speed. The following is supported:
· 1.44 Tbps of bandwidth in a 1 RU form factor
· 48 fixed 1/10-Gbps SFP+ ports
· 6 fixed 40-Gbps QSFP+ for uplink connectivity that can be turned into 10 Gb ports through a QSFP to SFP or SFP+ Adapter (QSA)
· Latency of 1 to 2 microseconds
· Front-to-back or back-to-front airflow configurations
· 1+1 redundant hot-swappable 80 Plus Platinum-certified power supplies
· Hot swappable 2+1 redundant fan tray
Figure 10 Nexus 9372PX Switch
The Nexus 9372PX switch will go end-of-sale in February 2018. For an all 40GB infrastructure, we recommend substituting the Nexus 9332PQ switch featuring 32 x 40GB ports.
Cisco MDS 9148S Fiber Channel Switch
The Cisco MDS 9148S 16G Multilayer Fabric Switch is the next generation of the highly reliable Cisco MDS 9100 Series Switches. It includes up to 48 auto-sensing line-rate 16-Gbps Fibre Channel ports in a compact easy to deploy and manage 1-rack-unit (1RU) form factor. In all, the Cisco MDS 9148S is a powerful and flexible switch that delivers high performance and comprehensive Enterprise-class features at an affordable price.
MDS 9148S has a pay-as-you-grow model which helps you scale from a 12 port base license to a 48 port with an incremental 12 port license. This helps customers to pay and activate only the required ports.
MDS 9148S has a dual power supply and FAN trays to provide physical redundancy. The software features, like ISSU and ISSD, helps with upgrading and downgrading code without reloading the switch and without interrupting the live traffic.
Figure 11 Cisco 9148S MDS Fibre Channel Switch
Features and Capabilities
Benefits
· Flexibility for growth and virtualization
· Easy deployment and management
· Optimized bandwidth utilization and reduced downtime
· Enterprise-class features and reliability at low cost
Features
· PowerOn Auto Provisioning and intelligent diagnostics
· In-Service Software Upgrade and dual redundant hot-swappable power supplies for high availability
· Role-based authentication, authorization, and accounting services to support regulatory requirements
· High-performance interswitch links with multipath load balancing
· Smart zoning and virtual output queuing
· Hardware-based slow port detection and recovery
Specifications at-a-Glance
Performance and Port Configuration
· 2/4/8/16-Gbps auto-sensing with 16 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth per port
· Up to 256 buffer credits per group of 4 ports (64 per port default, 253 maximum for a single port in the group)
· Supports configurations of 12, 24, 36, or 48 active ports, with pay-as-you-grow, on-demand licensing
Advanced Functions
· Virtual SAN (VSAN)
· Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR)
· PortChannel with multipath load balancing
· Flow-based and zone-based QoS
Hypervisor and Desktop Broker
This Cisco Validated Design includes VMware vSphere 6.5 and VMware Horizon 7.3.
VMware vSphere 6.5
VMware provides virtualization software. VMware’s enterprise software hypervisors for servers VMware vSphere ESX, vSphere ESXi, and VSphere—are bare-metal hypervisors that run directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system. VMware vCenter Server for vSphere provides central management and complete control and visibility into clusters, hosts, virtual machines, storage, networking, and other critical elements of your virtual infrastructure.
VMware vSphere 6.5 introduces many enhancements to vSphere Hypervisor, VMware virtual machines, vCenter Server, virtual storage, and virtual networking, further extending the core capabilities of the vSphere platform.
Today VMware announced vSphere 6.5, which is one of the most feature rich releases of vSphere in quite some time. The vCenter Server Appliance is taking charge in this release with several new features which we’ll cover in this blog article. For starters, the installer has gotten an overhaul with a new modern look and feel. Users of both Linux and Mac will also be ecstatic since the installer is now supported on those platforms along with Microsoft Windows. If that wasn’t enough, the vCenter Server Appliance now has features that are exclusive such as:
· Migration
· Improved Appliance Management
· VMware Update Manager
· Native High Availability
· Built-in Backup / Restore
vSphere Client
With vSphere 6.5 I’m excited to say that we have a fully supported version of the HTML5-based vSphere Client that will run alongside the vSphere Web Client. The vSphere Client is built right into vCenter Server 6.5 (both Windows and Appliance) and is enabled by default. While the vSphere Client does not yet have full feature parity the team have prioritized many of the day to day tasks of administrators and continue to seek feedback on what’s missing that will enable customers to use it full time. The vSphere Web Client will continue to be accessible via “http://<vcenter_fqdn>/vsphere-client” while the vSphere Client will be reachable via “http://<vcenter_fqdn>/ui”. VMware will also be periodically updating the vSphere Client outside of the normal vCenter Server release cycle. To make sure it is easy and simple for customers to stay up to date the vSphere Client will be able to be updated without any effects to the rest of vCenter Server.
The following are some of the benefits of the new vSphere Client:
· Clean, consistent UI built on VMware’s new Clarity UI standards (to be adopted across our portfolio)
· Built on HTML5 so it is truly a cross-browser and cross-platform application
· No browser plugins to install/manage
· Integrated into vCenter Server for 6.5 and fully supported
· Fully supports Enhanced Linked Mode
· Users of the Fling have been extremely positive about its performance
VMware ESXi 6.5 Hypervisor
vSphere 6.5 introduces a number of new features in the hypervisor:
· Scalability Improvements
ESXi 6.5 dramatically increases the scalability of the platform. With vSphere Hypervisor 6.0, clusters can scale to as many as 64 hosts, up from 32 in previous releases. With 64 hosts in a cluster, vSphere 6.0 can support 8000 virtual machines in a single cluster. This capability enables greater consolidation ratios, more efficient use of VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and fewer clusters that must be separately managed. Each vSphere Hypervisor 6.5 instance can support up to 480 logical CPUs, 12 terabytes (TB) of RAM, and 1024 virtual machines. By using the newest hardware advances, ESXi 6.5 enables the virtualization of applications that previously had been thought to be non-virtualizable.
· Security Enhancements
- Account management: ESXi 6.5 enables management of local accounts on the ESXi server using new ESXi CLI commands. The capability to add, list, remove, and modify accounts across all hosts in a cluster can be centrally managed using a vCenter Server system. Previously, the account and permission management functions for ESXi hosts were available only for direct host connections. The setup, removal, and listing of local permissions on ESXi servers can also be centrally managed.
- Account lockout: ESXi Host Advanced System Settings have two new options for the management of failed local account login attempts and account lockout duration. These parameters affect Secure Shell (SSH) and vSphere Web Services connections, but not ESXi direct console user interface (DCUI) or console shell access.
- Password complexity rules: In previous versions of ESXi, password complexity changes had to be made by manually editing the /etc/pam.d/passwd file on each ESXi host. In vSphere 6.0, an entry in Host Advanced System Settings enables changes to be centrally managed for all hosts in a cluster.
- Improved auditability of ESXi administrator actions: Prior to vSphere 6.0, actions at the vCenter Server level by a named user appeared in ESXi logs with the vpxuser username: for example, [user=vpxuser]. In vSphere 6.5, all actions at the vCenter Server level for an ESXi server appear in the ESXi logs with the vCenter Server username: for example, [user=vpxuser: DOMAIN\User]. This approach provides a better audit trail for actions run on a vCenter Server instance that conducted corresponding tasks on the ESXi hosts.
- Flexible lockdown modes: Prior to vSphere 6.5, only one lockdown mode was available. Feedback from customers indicated that this lockdown mode was inflexible in some use cases. With vSphere 6.5, two lockdown modes are available:
o In normal lockdown mode, DCUI access is not stopped, and users on the DCUI access list can access the DCUI.
o In strict lockdown mode, the DCUI is stopped.
o Exception users: vSphere 6.0 offers a new function called exception users. Exception users are local accounts or Microsoft Active Directory accounts with permissions defined locally on the host to which these users have host access. These exception users are not recommended for general user accounts, but they are recommended for use by third-party applications—for service accounts, for example—that need host access when either normal or strict lockdown mode is enabled. Permissions on these accounts should be set to the bare minimum required for the application to perform its task and with an account that needs only read-only permissions on the ESXi host.
- Smart card authentication to DCUI: This function is for U.S. federal customers only. It enables DCUI login access using a Common Access Card (CAC) and Personal Identity Verification (PIV). The ESXi host must be part of an Active Directory domain.
VMware Horizon Version 7
Enterprise IT organizations are tasked with the challenge of provisioning Microsoft Windows apps and desktops while managing cost, centralizing control, and enforcing corporate security policy. Deploying Windows apps to users in any location, regardless of the device type and available network bandwidth, enables a mobile workforce that can improve productivity. With VMware Horizon 7, IT can effectively control app and desktop provisioning while securing data assets and lowering capital and operating expenses.
VMware Horizon
VMware Horizon desktop virtualization solutions built on a unified architecture so they are simple to manage and flexible enough to meet the needs of all your organization's users. You use the same architecture and management tools to manage public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments as you do for on premises deployments
· VMware Horizon Virtual machines and RDSH known as server-based hosted sessions: These are applications hosted from Microsoft Windows servers to any type of device, including Windows PCs, Macs, smartphones, and tablets. Some VMware editions include technologies that further optimize the experience of using Windows applications on a mobile device by automatically translating native mobile-device display, navigation, and controls to Windows applications; enhancing performance over mobile networks; and enabling developers to optimize any custom Windows application for any mobile environment.
· VMware Horizon RDSH session users also known as server-hosted desktops: These are inexpensive, locked-down Windows virtual desktops hosted from Windows server operating systems. They are well suited for users, such as call center employees, who perform a standard set of tasks.
Advantages of Using VMware Horizon
VMware Horizon 7 provides the following new features and enhancements:
· Instant Clones
- A new type of desktop virtual machines that can be provisioned significantly faster than the traditional Composer linked clones.
- A fully functional desktop can be provisioned in two seconds or less.
- Recreating a desktop pool with a new OS image can be accomplished in a fraction of the time it takes a Composer desktop pool because the parent image can be prepared well ahead of the scheduled time of pool recreation.
- Clones are automatically rebalanced across available datastores.
- View storage accelerator is automatically enabled.
· VMware Blast Extreme
- VMware Blast Extreme is now fully supported on the Horizon platform.
- Administrators can select the VMware Blast display protocol as the default or available protocol for pools, farms, and entitlements.
- End users can select the VMware Blast display protocol when connecting to remote desktops and applications.
- VMware Blast Extreme features include:
o TCP and UDP transport support
o H.264 support for the best performance across more devices
o Reduced device power consumption for longer battery life
o NVIDIA GRID acceleration for more graphical workloads per server, better performance, and a superior remote user experience
· True SSO
- For VMware Identity Manager integration, True SSO streamlines the end-to-end login experience. After users log in to VMware Identity Manager using a smart card or an RSA SecurID or RADIUS token, users are not required to also enter Active Directory credentials in order to use a remote desktop or application.
- Uses a short-lived Horizon virtual certificate to enable a password-free Windows login.
- Supports using either a native Horizon Client or HTML Access.
- System health status for True SSO appears in the Horizon Administrator dashboard.
- Can be used in a single domain, in a single forest with multiple domains, and in a multiple-forest, multiple-domain setup.
· Smart Policies
- Control of the clipboard cut-and-paste, client drive redirection, USB redirection, and virtual printing desktop features through defined policies.
- PCoIP session control through PCoIP profiles.
- Conditional policies based on user location, desktop tagging, pool name, and Horizon Client registry values.
· Configure the clipboard memory size for VMware Blast and PCoIP sessions
Horizon administrators can configure the server clipboard memory size by setting GPOs for VMware Blast and PCoIP sessions. Horizon Client 4.1 users on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X systems can configure the client clipboard memory size. The effective memory size is the lesser of the server and client clipboard memory size values.
· VMware Blast network recovery enhancements
Network recovery is now supported for VMware Blast sessions initiated from iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Linux, and Chrome OS clients. Previously, network recovery was supported only for Windows client sessions. If you lose your network connection unexpectedly during a VMware Blast session, Horizon Client attempts to reconnect to the network and you can continue to use your remote desktop or application. The network recovery feature also supports IP roaming, which means you can resume your VMware Blast session after switching to a WiFi network.
· Configure Horizon Administrator to not remember the login name
Horizon administrators can configure not to display the Remember user name check box and therefore not remember the administrator's login name.
· Allow Mac OS X users to save credentials
Horizon administrators can configure Connection Server to allow Horizon Client Mac OS X systems to remember a user's user name, password, and domain information. If users choose to have their credentials saved, the credentials are added to the login fields in Horizon Client on subsequent connections.
· Microsoft Windows 10
- Windows 10 is supported as a desktop guest operating system
- Horizon Client runs on Windows 10
- Smart card is supported on Windows 10
- The Horizon User Profile Migration tool migrates Windows 7, 8/8.1, Server 2008 R2, or Server 2012 R2 user profiles to Windows 10 user profiles.
· RDS Desktops and Hosted Apps
- View Composer. View Composer and linked clones provide automated and efficient management of RDS server farms.
- Graphics Support. Existing 3D vDGA and GRID vGPU graphics solutions on VDI desktops have been extended to RDS hosts, enabling graphics-intensive applications to run on RDS desktops and Hosted Apps.
- Enhanced Load Balancing. A new capability provides load balancing of server farm applications based on memory and CPU resources.
- One-Way AD Trusts. One-way AD trust domains are now supported. This feature enables environments with limited trust relationships between domains without requiring Horizon Connection Server to be in an external domain.
· Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) Enhancements
- Hosted App Support. Support for application remoting allows applications to be launched using global entitlements across a pod federation.
- HTML Access (Blast) Support. Users can use HTML Access to connect to remote desktops and applications in a Cloud Pod Architecture deployment.
· Access Point Integration
Access Point is a hardened Linux-based virtual appliance that protects virtual desktop and application resources to allow secure remote access from the Internet. Access Point provides a new authenticating DMZ gateway to Horizon Connection Server. Smart card support on Access Point is available as a Tech Preview. Security server will continue to be available as an alternative configuration. For more information, see Deploying and Configuring Access Point.
· FIPS
Install-time FIPS mode allows customers with high security requirements to deploy Horizon 6.
· Graphics Enhancements
- AMD vDGA enables vDGA pass-through graphics for AMD graphics hardware.
- 4K resolution monitors (3840x2160) are supported.
· Horizon Administrator Enhancements
- Horizon Administrator shows additional licensing information, including license key, named user and concurrent connection user count.
- Pool creation is streamlined by letting Horizon administrators to clone existing pools.
- Support for IPv6 with VMware Blast Extreme on security servers.
- Horizon Administrator security protection layer. See VMware Knowledge Base (KB) article 2144303 for more information: https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2144303
- Protection against inadvertent pool deletion.
- RDS per-device licensing improvements.
- Support for Intel vDGA.
- Support for AMD Multiuser GPU Using vDGA.
- More resilient upgrades.
- Display scaling for Windows Horizon Clients.
- DPI scaling is supported if it is set at the system level and the scaling level is greater than 100.
What are VMware RDS Hosted Sessions?
The following describes the VMware RDS Hosted Sessions:
· An RDS host is a server computer that hosts applications and desktop sessions for remote access. An RDS host can be a virtual machine or a physical server.
· An RDS host has the Microsoft Remote Desktop Services role, the Microsoft Remote Desktop Session Host service, and Horizon Agent installed. Remote Desktop Services was previously known as Terminal Services. The Remote Desktop Session Host service allows a server to host applications and remote desktop sessions. With Horizon Agent installed on an RDS host, users can connect to applications and desktop sessions by using the display protocol PCoIP or Blast Extreme. Both protocols provide an optimized user experience for the delivery of remote content, including images, audio and video.
· The performance of an RDS host depends on many factors. For information on how to tune the performance of different versions of Windows Server, see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/hardware/gg463392.aspx.
· Horizon 7 supports at most one desktop session and one application session per user on an RDS host.
· When users submit print jobs concurrently from RDS desktops or applications that are hosted on the same RDS host, the ThinPrint server on the RDS host processes the print requests serially rather than in parallel. This can cause a delay for some users. Note that the print server does not wait for a print job to complete before processing the next one. Print jobs that are sent to different printers will print in parallel.
· If a user launches an application and also an RDS desktop, and both are hosted on the same RDS host, they share the same user profile. If the user launches an application from the desktop, conflicts may result if both applications try to access or modify the same parts of the user profile, and one of the applications may fail to run properly.
· The process of setting up applications or RDS desktops for remote access involves the following tasks:
- Installing Applications
If you plan to create application pools, you must install the applications on the RDS hosts. If you want Horizon 7 to automatically display the list of installed applications, you must install the applications so that they are available to all users from the Start menu. You can install an application at any time before you create the application pool. If you plan to manually specify an application, you can install the application at any time, either before or after creating an application pool.
IMPORTANT: When you install an application, you must install it on all the RDS hosts in a farm and in the same location on each RDS host. If you do not, a health warning will appear on the View Administrator dashboard. In such a situation, if you create an application pool, users might encounter an error when they try to run the application.
When you create an application pool, Horizon 7 automatically displays the applications that are available to all users rather than individual users from the Start menu on all of the RDS hosts in a farm. You can choose any applications from that list. In addition, you can manually specify an application that is not available to all users from the Start menu. There is no limit on the number of applications that you can install on an RDS host.
Farms, RDS Hosts, and Desktop and Application Pools
With VMware Horizon, you can create desktop and application pools to give users remote access to virtual machine-based desktops, session-based desktops, physical computers, and applications. Horizon takes advantage of Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and VMware PC-over-IP (PCoIP) technologies to provide high-quality remote access to users.
· RDS Hosts
RDS hosts are server computers that have Windows Remote Desktop Services and View Agent installed. These servers host applications and desktop sessions that users can access remotely. To use RDS desktop pools or applications, your end users must have access to Horizon Client 3.0 or later software.
· Desktop Pools
There are three types of desktop pools: automated, manual, and RDS. Automated desktop pools use a vCenter Server virtual machine template or snapshot to create a pool of identical virtual machines. Manual desktop pools are a collection of existing vCenter Server virtual machines, physical computers, or third-party virtual machines. In automated or manual pools, each machine is available for one user to access remotely at a time. RDS desktop pools are not a collection of machines, but instead, provide users with desktop sessions on RDS hosts. Multiple users can have desktop sessions on an RDS host simultaneously.
· Application Pools
Application pools let you deliver applications to many users. The applications in application pools run on a farm of RDS hosts.
· Farms
Farms are collections of RDS hosts and facilitate the management of those hosts. Farms can have a variable number of RDS hosts and provide a common set of applications or RDS desktops to users. When you create an RDS desktop pool or an application pool, you must specify a farm. The RDS hosts in the farm provide desktop and application sessions to users.
Some of the latest VMware Horizon features and enhancements are:
· Flash Redirection
- You can compile a black list to ensure that the URLs specified in the list will not be able to redirect Flash content. You must enable the GPO setting FlashMMRUrlListEnableType to use either a white list or black list.
· Horizon Agent Policy Settings
- The VMwareAgentCIT policy setting enables remote connections to Internet Explorer to use the Client's IP address instead of the IP address of the remote desktop machine.
- The FlashMMRUrlListEnableType and FlashMMRUrlList policy settings specify and control the white list or black list that enables or disables the list of URLs from using Flash Redirection.
· Horizon PowerCLI
- View PowerCLI is deprecated. Horizon PowerCLI replaces View PowerCLI and includes cmdlets that you can use with VMware PowerCLI.
- For more information about Horizon PowerCLI cmdlets, read the VMware PowerCLI Cmdlets Reference.
- For information on the API specifications to create advanced functions and scripts to use with Horizon PowerCLI, see the API Reference at the VMware Developer Center
- For more information on sample scripts that you can use to create your own Horizon PowerCLI scripts, see the Horizon PowerCLI community on GitHub.
· Horizon 7 for Linux desktops enhancements
- UDP based Blast Extreme connectivity
User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is enabled by default in both the client and the agent. Note that Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connectivity will have a better performance than UDP on the Local Area Network (LAN). UDP will have better performance than TCP over Wide Area Network (WAN). If you are on a LAN, disable the UDP feature to switch to using TCP to get better connectivity performance.
- KDE support
K Desktop Environment (KDE) support is now also available on CentOS 7, RHEL 7, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04, and SLED 11 SP4 platforms.
- MATE support
MATE desktop environment is supported on Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 virtual machines.
- Hardware H.264 Encoder
The hardware H.264 encoder is now available and used when the vGPU is configured with the NVIDIA graphics card that has the NVIDIA driver 384 series or later installed on it.
- Additional platforms support
RHEL 7.4 x64 and CentOS 7.4 x64 are now supported.
· Remote Desktop Operating System
- Windows 10 version 1607 Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB)
- Windows Server 2016
Horizon Agent
· HTML5 Multimedia Redirection
You can install the HTML5 Multimedia Redirection feature by selecting the HTML5 Multimedia Redirection custom setup option in the Horizon Agent installer. With HTML5 Multimedia Redirection, if an end user uses the Chrome browser, HTML5 multimedia content is sent from the remote desktop to the client system, reducing the load on the ESXi host. The client system plays the multimedia content and the user has a better audio and video experience.
· SHA-256 support
Horizon Agent has been updated to support the SHA-256 cryptographic hash algorithm. SHA-256 is also supported in Horizon Client 4.6 and Horizon 7 version 7.2 and later.
· Improved USB redirection with User Environment Manager
- The default User Environment Manager timeout value has been increased. This change makes sure that the USB redirection smart policy takes effect even when the login process takes a long time. With Horizon Client 4.6, the User Environment Manager timeout value is configured only on the agent and is sent from the agent to the client.
- You can now bypass User Environment Manager control of USB redirection by setting a registry key on the agent machine. This change helps ensure that smart card SSO works on Teradici zero clients.
· Composer
- For enhanced security, you can enable the digest access authentication method for Composer.
· Persona Management
- Persona Management supports guest operating systems that use the "v6" version of the user profile.
- You can use the migration tool to migrate the "v2" and "v5" user profiles versions to the "v6" user profile version. The tool is installed with the Persona binary file.
Horizon Connection Server Enhanced Features
· Horizon Help Desk Tool
- View application and process names and resource use within a virtual or published desktop to identify which applications and process are using up machine resources.
- View event log information about the user's activities.
- View updated metrics such as Horizon Client version and the Blast protocol.
- View additional session metrics such as the VM information, CPU, or memory usage.
- You can assign predefined administrator roles to Horizon Help Desk Tool administrators to delegate the troubleshooting tasks between administrator users. You can also create custom roles and add privileges based on the predefined administrator roles.
- You can verify the product license key for Horizon Help Desk Tool and apply a valid license.
· Monitoring
- If the event database shuts down, Horizon Administrator maintains an audit trail of the events that occur before and after the event database shutdown.
· Instant Clones
- You can create dedicated instant-clone desktop pools.
- Windows Server operating systems are supported for instant clones in this release. For an updated list of supported Windows Server operating systems, see the VMware Knowledge Base (KB) article 2150295.
- You can copy, paste, or enter the path for the AD tree in the AD container field when you create an instant-clone desktop pool.
- If there are no internal VMs in all four internal folders created in vSphere Web Client, these folders are unprotected and you can delete these folders.
- You can use the enhanced instant-clone maintenance utility IcUnprotect.cmd to unprotect or delete template, replica, or parent VMs or folders from vSphere hosts.
- Instant clones are compatible with Storage DRS (sDRS). Therefore, instant clones can reside in a datastore that is part of an sDRS cluster.
· Cloud Pod Architecture
- The total session limit is increased to 140,000.
- The site limit is increased to 7.
- You can configure Windows Start menu shortcuts for global entitlements. When an entitled user connects to a Connection Server instance in the pod federation, Horizon Client for Windows places these shortcuts in the Start menu on the user's Windows client device.
· Published Desktops and Application Pools
- You can restrict access to entitled desktop pools, application pools, global entitlements, and global application entitlements from certain client computers.
- You can configure Windows start menu shortcuts for entitled desktop and application pools. When an entitled user connects to a Connection Server instance, Horizon Client for Windows places these shortcuts in the Start menu on the user's Windows client device.
· Virtual Desktops and Desktop Pools
- Blast Extreme provides network continuity during momentary network loss on Windows clients.
- Performance counters displayed using PerfMon on Windows agents for Blast session, imaging, audio, CDR, USB, and virtual printing provide an accurate representation of the current state of the system that also updates at a constant rate.
· Customer Experience Improvement Program
- Details regarding the data collected through CEIP and the purposes for which it is used by VMware are set forth at the Trust Assurance Center.
· Security
- With the USB over Session Enhancement SDK feature, you do not need to open TCP port 32111 for USB traffic in a DMZ-based security server deployment. This feature is supported for both virtual desktops and published desktops on RDS hosts.
· Database Support
- The Always On Availability Groups feature for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 is supported in this release of Horizon 7. For more information, refer to the Release Notes.
Supported Windows 10 Operating Systems
Horizon 7 version 7.3.1 supports the following Windows 10 operating systems:
· Windows 10 version 1507 (RTM) Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB)
· Windows 10 version 1607 Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB)
· Windows 10 version 1607 Enterprise Current Branch (CBB)
· Windows 10 version 1703 Semi Annual Channel (broad deployment) Current Branch (CBB)
For the complete list of supported Windows 10 on Horizon including all VDI (Full Clones, Linked and Instant clones) click the following links: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2149393 and https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2150295?r=2&Quarterback.validateRoute=1&KM_Utility.getArticleData=1&KM_Utility.getGUser=1&KM_Utility.getArticleLanguage=2&KM_Utility.getArticle=1
Windows 10 LTSB version 1607 being used in this study.
Figure 12 Logical Architecture of VMware Horizon
VMware Horizon Composer
VMware Horizon Composer is a feature in Horizon that gives administrators the ability to manage virtual machine pools or the desktop pools that share a common virtual disk. An administrator can update the master image, then all desktops using linked clones of that master image can also be patched. Updating the master image will patch the cloned desktops of the users without touching their applications, data or settings.
The VMware View Composer pooled desktops solution’s infrastructure is based on software-streaming technology. After installing and configuring the composed pooled desktops, a single shared disk image (Master Image) is taken a snapshot of the OS and application image, and then storing that snapshot file accessible to host(s).
Figure 13 VMware Horizon Composer
Desktop Virtualization Design Fundamentals
An ever growing and diverse base of user devices, complexity in management of traditional desktops, security, and even Bring Your Own (BYO) device to work programs are prime reasons for moving to a virtual desktop solution.
VMware Horizon Design Fundamentals
VMware Horizon 7 integrates Remote Desktop Server Hosted sessions users and VDI desktop virtualization technologies into a unified architecture that enables a scalable, simple, efficient, mixed users and manageable solution for delivering Windows applications and desktops as a service.
Users can select applications from an easy-to-use “store” that is accessible from tablets, smartphones, PCs, Macs, and thin clients. VMware Horizon delivers a native touch-optimized experience via PCoIP or Blast Extreme high-definition performance, even over mobile networks.
Horizon VDI Pool and RDSH Servers Pool
Collections of identical Virtual Machines (VMs) or physical computers are managed as a single entity called a Desktop Pool. In this CVD, VM provisioning relies on VMware View Composer aligning with VMware Horizon Connection Server with vCenter Server components. In this CVD, machines in the Pools are configured to run either a Windows Server 2016 OS (for RDS Hosted shared sessions) and a Windows 10 Desktop OS (for pooled VDI desktops).
Figure 14 VMware Horizon Design Overview
Figure 15 Horizon VDI and RDSH Desktop Delivery Based on Display Protocol (PCoIP/Blast/RDP)
NetApp A-Series All Flash FAS
With the new NetApp A-Series All Flash FAS (AFF) controller lineup, NetApp provides industry-leading performance while continuing to provide a full suite of enterprise-grade data management and data protection features. The A-Series lineup offers double the IOPS, while decreasing the latency. The AFF A-Series lineup includes the A200, A300, A700, and A700s. These controllers and their specifications listed in Table 5. For more information about the A-Series AFF controllers, see:
· http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/all-flash-array/aff-a-series.aspx
· https://hwu.netapp.com/Controller/Index
Table 5 NetApp A-Series Controller Specifications
|
|
AFF A200 |
AFF A300 |
AFF A700 |
AFF A700s |
| NAS Scale-out |
2-8 nodes |
2-24 nodes |
2-24 nodes |
2-24 nodes |
| SAN Scale-out |
2-8 nodes |
2-12 nodes |
2-12 nodes |
2-12 nodes |
| Per HA Pair Specifications (Active-Active Dual Controller) |
||||
| Maximum SSDs |
144 |
384 |
480 |
216 |
| Maximum Raw Capacity |
2.2PB |
5.9PB |
7.3PB |
3.3PB |
| Effective Capacity |
8.8PB |
23.8PB |
29.7PB |
13PB |
| Chassis Form Factor |
2U chassis with two HA controllers and 24 SSD slots |
3U chassis with two HA controllers |
8u chassis with two HA controllers |
4u chassis with two HA controllers and 24 SSD slots |
This solution utilizes the NetApp AFF A300, seen in Figure 8 and Figure 9. This controller provides the high-performance benefits of 40GbE and all flash SSDs, offering better performance than previous models, and occupying only 3U of rack space versus 6U with the AFF8040. When combined with the 2U disk shelf of 3.8TB disks, this solution can provide ample horsepower and over 90TB of raw capacity, all while occupying only 5U of valuable rack space. This makes it an ideal controller for a shared workload converged infrastructure. The A700s would be an ideal fit for situations where more performance is needed
The FlexPod reference architecture supports a variety of NetApp FAS controllers such as FAS9000, FAS8000, FAS2600 and FAS2500; AFF A-Series platforms such as AFF8000; and legacy NetApp storage.
For more information about the AFF A-Series product family, see: http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/all-flash-array/aff-a-series.aspx
The 40GbE cards are installed in the expansion slot 2 and the ports are e2a, e2e.
Figure 16 NetApp AFF A300 Front View
Figure 17 NetApp AFF A300 Rear View
NetApp ONTAP 9.1
Storage Efficiency
Storage efficiency has always been a primary architectural design point of ONTAP. A wide array of features allows businesses to store more data using less space. In addition to deduplication and compression, businesses can store their data more efficiently by using features such as unified storage, multi-tenancy, thin provisioning, and NetApp Snapshot® technology.
Starting with ONTAP 9, NetApp guarantees that the use of NetApp storage efficiency technologies on AFF systems reduce the total logical capacity used to store customer data by 75 percent, a data reduction ratio of 4:1. This space reduction is a combination of several different technologies, such as deduplication, compression, and compaction, which provide additional reduction to the basic features provided by ONTAP.
Compaction, which is introduced in ONTAP 9, is the latest patented storage efficiency technology released by NetApp. In the NetApp WAFL® file system, all I/O takes up 4KB of space, even if it does not actually require 4KB of data. Compaction combines multiple blocks that are not using their full 4KB of space together into one block. This one block can be more efficiently stored on the disk-to-save space. This process is illustrated in Figure 18.
NetApp Storage Virtual Machine (SVM)
A cluster serves data through at least one and possibly multiple storage virtual machines (SVMs, formerly called Vservers). An SVM is a logical abstraction that represents the set of physical resources of the cluster. Data volumes and network logical interfaces (LIFs) are created and assigned to an SVM and may reside on any node in the cluster to which the SVM has been given access. An SVM may own resources on multiple nodes concurrently, and those resources can be moved nondisruptively from one node to another. For example, a flexible volume can be nondisruptively moved to a new node and aggregate, or a data LIF can be transparently reassigned to a different physical network port. The SVM abstracts the cluster hardware and it is not tied to any specific physical hardware.
An SVM can support multiple data protocols concurrently. Volumes within the SVM can be joined together to form a single NAS namespace, which makes all of an SVM's data available through a single share or mount point to NFS and CIFS clients. SVMs also support block-based protocols, and LUNs can be created and exported by using iSCSI, FC, or FCoE. Any or all of these data protocols can be configured for use within a given SVM.
Because it is a secure entity, an SVM is only aware of the resources that are assigned to it and has no knowledge of other SVMs and their respective resources. Each SVM operates as a separate and distinct entity with its own security domain. Tenants can manage the resources allocated to them through a delegated SVM administration account. Each SVM can connect to unique authentication zones such as Active Directory, LDAP, or NIS. A NetApp cluster can contain multiple SVMs. If you have multiple SVMs, you can delegate an SVM to a specific application. This allows administrators of the application to access only the dedicated SVMs and associated storage, increasing manageability, and reducing risk.
SAN Boot
NetApp recommends implementing SAN boot for Cisco UCS servers in the FlexPod Datacenter solution. Doing so enables the operating system to be safely secured by the NetApp All Flash FAS storage system, providing better performance. In this design, FC SAN boot is validated.
In FC SAN boot, each Cisco UCS server boots by connecting the NetApp All Flash FAS storage to the Cisco MDS switch. The 16G FC storage ports, in this example 0g and 0h, are connected to Cisco MDS switch. The FC LIFs are created on the physical ports and each FC LIF is uniquely identified by its target WWPN. The storage system target WWPNs can be zoned with the server initiator WWPNs in the Cisco MDS switches. The FC boot LUN is exposed to the servers through the FC LIF using the MDS switch; this enables only the authorized server to have access to the boot LUN. Refer Figure 19 for the port and LIF layout
Figure 19 FC - SVM ports and LIF layout
Unlike NAS network interfaces, the SAN network interfaces are not configured to fail over during a failure. Instead if a network interface becomes unavailable, the host chooses a new optimized path to an available network interface. ALUA is a standard supported by NetApp used to provide information about SCSI targets, which allows a host to identify the best path to the storage.
There are many reasons to consider a virtual desktop solution such as an ever growing and diverse base of user devices, complexity in management of traditional desktops, security, and even Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to work programs. The first step in designing a virtual desktop solution is to understand the user community and the type of tasks that are required to successfully execute their role. The following user classifications are provided:
· Knowledge Workers today do not just work in their offices all day; they attend meetings, visit branch offices, work from home, and even coffee shops. These anywhere workers expect access to all of their same applications and data wherever they are.
· External Contractors are increasingly part of your everyday business. They need access to certain portions of your applications and data, yet administrators still have little control over the devices they use and the locations they work from. Consequently, IT is stuck making trade-offs on the cost of providing these workers a device vs. the security risk of allowing them access from their own devices.
· Task Workers perform a set of well-defined tasks. These workers access a small set of applications and have limited requirements from their PCs. However, since these workers are interacting with your customers, partners, and employees, they have access to your most critical data.
· Mobile Workers need access to their virtual desktop from everywhere, regardless of their ability to connect to a network. In addition, these workers expect the ability to personalize their PCs, by installing their own applications and storing their own data, such as photos and music, on these devices.
· Shared Workstation users are often found in state-of-the-art university and business computer labs, conference rooms or training centers. Shared workstation environments have the constant requirement to re-provision desktops with the latest operating systems and applications as the needs of the organization change, tops the list.
After the user classifications have been identified and the business requirements for each user classification have been defined, it becomes essential to evaluate the types of virtual desktops that are needed based on user requirements. There are essentially five potential desktops environments for each user:
· Traditional PC: A traditional PC is what typically constitutes a desktop environment: physical device with a locally installed operating system.
· Hosted Shared Desktop: A hosted, server-based desktop is a desktop where the user interacts through a delivery protocol. With hosted, server-based desktops, a single installed instance of a server operating system, such as Microsoft Windows Server 2016, is shared by multiple users simultaneously. Each user receives a desktop "session" and works in an isolated memory space. Remoted Desktop Server Hosted Server sessions: A hosted virtual desktop is a virtual desktop running on a virtualization layer (ESX). The user does not work with and sit in front of the desktop, but instead the user interacts through a delivery protocol.
· Published Applications: Published applications run entirely on the VMware Horizon RDS hosted server virtual machines and the user interacts through a delivery protocol. With published applications, a single installed instance of an application, such as Microsoft Office, is shared by multiple users simultaneously. Each user receives an application "session" and works in an isolated memory space.
· Streamed Applications: Streamed desktops and applications run entirely on the user‘s local client device and are sent from a server on demand. The user interacts with the application or desktop directly but the resources may only available while they are connected to the network.
· Local Virtual Desktop: A local virtual desktop is a desktop running entirely on the user‘s local device and continues to operate when disconnected from the network. In this case, the user’s local device is used as a type 1 hypervisor and is synced with the data center when the device is connected to the network.
Understanding Applications and Data
When the desktop user groups and sub-groups have been identified, the next task is to catalog group application and data requirements. This can be one of the most time-consuming processes in the VDI planning exercise, but is essential for the VDI project’s success. If the applications and data are not identified and co-located, performance will be negatively affected.
The process of analyzing the variety of application and data pairs for an organization will likely be complicated by the inclusion cloud applications, for example, SalesForce.com. This application and data analysis is beyond the scope of this Cisco Validated Design, but should not be omitted from the planning process. There are a variety of third party tools available to assist organizations with this crucial exercise.
Project Planning and Solution Sizing Sample Questions
Now that user groups, their applications and their data requirements are understood, some key project and solution sizing questions may be considered.
General project questions should be addressed at the outset, including:
· Has a VDI pilot plan been created based on the business analysis of the desktop groups, applications and data?
· Is there infrastructure and budget in place to run the pilot program?
· Are the required skill sets to execute the VDI project available? Can we hire or contract for them?
· Do we have end user experience performance metrics identified for each desktop sub-group?
· How will we measure success or failure?
· What is the future implication of success or failure?
Below is a short, non-exhaustive list of sizing questions that should be addressed for each user sub-group:
· What is the desktop OS planned? Windows 8 or Windows 10?
· 32 bit or 64 bit desktop OS?
· How many virtual desktops will be deployed in the pilot? In production? All Windows 8/10?
· How much memory per target desktop group desktop?
· Are there any rich media, Flash, or graphics-intensive workloads?
· Will VMware Horizon RDSH be used for Hosted Shared Server applications planned? Are they are any applications installed?
· What is the desktop OS planned for RDS Server Roles? Windows server 2012 or Server 2016?
· Will VMware Horizon Composer or Instant Clones or another method be used for virtual desktop deployment?
· What is the hypervisor for the solution?
· What is the storage configuration in the existing environment?
· Are there sufficient IOPS available for the write-intensive VDI workload?
· Will there be storage dedicated and tuned for VDI service?
· Is there a voice component to the desktop?
· Is anti-virus a part of the image?
· What is the SQL server version for database? SQL server 2012 or 2016?
· Is user profile management (for example, non-roaming profile based) part of the solution?
· What is the fault tolerance, failover, disaster recovery plan?
· Are there additional desktop sub-group specific questions?
Hypervisor Selection
VMware vSphere has been identified the hypervisor for both RDS Hosted Sessions and VDI based desktops:
· VMware vSphere: VMware vSphere comprises the management infrastructure or virtual center server software and the hypervisor software that virtualizes the hardware resources on the servers. It offers features like Distributed Resource Scheduler, vMotion, high availability, Storage vMotion, VMFS, and a multi-pathing storage layer. More information on vSphere can be obtained at the VMware web site: http://www.vmware.com/products/datacentervirtualization/vsphere/overview.html.
For this CVD, the hypervisor used was VMware ESXi 6.5 Update 1.
Designing a VMware Horizon Environment for a Mixed Workload
With VMware Horizon 7 the method you choose to provide applications or desktops to users depends on the types of applications and desktops you are hosting and available system resources, as well as the types of users and user experience you want to provide.
Table 6 Designing a VMware Horizon Environment
| Server OS machines |
You want: Inexpensive server-based delivery to minimize the cost of delivering applications to a large number of users, while providing a secure, high-definition user experience. Your users: Perform well-defined tasks and do not require personalization or offline access to applications. Users may include task workers such as call center operators and retail workers, or users that share workstations. Application types: Any application. |
| Desktop OS machines
|
You want: A client-based application delivery solution that is secure, provides centralized management, and supports a large number of users per host server (or hypervisor), while providing users with applications that display seamlessly in high-definition. Your users: Are internal, external contractors, third-party collaborators, and other provisional team members. Users do not require off-line access to hosted applications. Application types: Applications that might not work well with other applications or might interact with the operating system, such as .NET framework. These types of applications are ideal for hosting on virtual machines. Applications running on older operating systems such as Windows XP or Windows Vista, and older architectures, such as 32-bit or 16-bit. By isolating each application on its own virtual machine, if one machine fails, it does not impact other users. |
| Remote PC Access
|
You want: Employees with secure remote access to a physical computer without using a VPN. For example, the user may be accessing their physical desktop PC from home or through a public WIFI hotspot. Depending upon the location, you may want to restrict the ability to print or copy and paste outside of the desktop. This method enables BYO device support without migrating desktop images into the datacenter. Your users: Employees or contractors that have the option to work from home, but need access to specific software or data on their corporate desktops to perform their jobs remotely. Host: The same as Desktop OS machines. Application types: Applications that are delivered from an office computer and display seamlessly in high definition on the remote user's device. |
For the Cisco Validated Design described in this document, a mix of Remote Desktop Server Hosted sessions (RDSH) using RDS based Server OS and VMware Horizon pooled Linked Clone Virtual Machine Desktops using VDI based desktop OS machines were configured and tested.
The mix consisted of a combination of both use cases. The following sections discuss design decisions relative to the VMware Horizon deployment, including the CVD test environment.
Products Deployed
The architecture deployed is highly modular. While each customer’s environment might vary in its exact configuration, the reference architecture contained in this document once built, can easily be scaled as requirements and demands change. This includes scaling both up (adding additional resources within a Cisco UCS Domain) and out (adding additional Cisco UCS Domains and NetApp AFF A300 storage arrays).
The FlexPod Datacenter solution includes Cisco networking, Cisco UCS and NetApp AFF A300 storage, which efficiently fit into a single data center rack, including the access layer network switches.
This CVD document details the deployment of 5000 users for a mixed VMware Horizon desktop workload featuring the following software:
This validated design document details the deployment of the multiple configurations extending to 5000 users for a mixed Horizon workload featuring the following software:
· VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5 Update 1 Hypervisor
· Microsoft SQL Server 2016
· VMware Horizon 7 Shared Remote Desktop Server Hosted Sessions (RDSH) on NetApp AFF A300 FC storage
· VMware Horizon 7 Non-Persistent Virtual Desktops (VDI) on NetApp AFF A300 on FC storage
· VMware Horizon 7 Persistent Virtual Desktops (VDI) on NetApp AFF A300 on FC storage
· VMware Horizon 7 Connection Server and Additional Replica Servers
· VMware Horizon 7 Composer Server
· Microsoft Windows Server 2016 for Infrastructure
· Microsoft Windows Server 2016 for RDS Server Roles Configuration
· Windows 10 64-bit virtual machine Operating Systems for Non- Persistent and Persistent virtual machine users
Figure 20 details the physical hardware and cabling deployed to enable this solution.
Figure 20 Virtual Desktop Workload Architecture for the 5000 seat on VMware Horizon 7 on FlexPod
Hardware Deployed
The solution contains the following hardware as shown in Figure 20:
· Two Cisco Nexus 9372PX Layer 2 Access Switches
· Two Cisco MDS 9148S 16Gb Fibre Channel Switches
· Four Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis with two Cisco UCS-IOM-2304 IO Modules
· Two Cisco UCS B200 M4 Blade servers with Intel Xeon E5-2660v3 2.60-GHz 10-core processors, 128GB 2133MHz RAM, and one Cisco VIC1340 mezzanine card for the hosted infrastructure, providing N+1 server fault tolerance
· Seven Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Servers with Intel Xeon Gold 6140 2.30-GHz 18-core processors, 768GB 2666MHz RAM, and one Cisco VIC1340 mezzanine card for the VMware Horizon Remote Desktop Server Hosted Sessions workload, providing N+1 server fault tolerance at the workload cluster level
· Nine Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Servers with Intel Xeon Gold 6140 2.30-GHz 18-core processors, 768GB 2666MHz RAM, and one Cisco VIC1340 mezzanine card for the VMware Horizon Instant Clones VDI desktops workload, providing N+1 server fault tolerance at the workload cluster level
· Nine Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Servers with Intel Xeon Gold 6140 2.30-GHz 18-core processors, 768GB 2666MHz RAM, and one Cisco VIC1340 mezzanine card for the VMware Horizon Full Clones VDI desktops workload, providing N+1 server fault tolerance at the workload cluster level
· NetApp AFF A300 Storage System with dual redundant controllers, 1x DS224C disk shelf, and 24x 3.8 TB solid-state drives.
Table 7 lists the software and firmware version used in the study.
Table 7 Software and Firmware Versions used
| Vendor |
Product / Component |
Version / Build / Code |
| Cisco |
UCS Component Firmware |
3.2(1b) bundle release |
| Cisco |
UCS Manager |
3.2(1b) bundle release |
| Cisco |
UCS B200 M4 Blades |
3.2(1b) bundle release |
| Cisco |
VIC 1340 |
4.1(1d) |
| VMware |
VMware Horizon |
7.3.1 |
| VMware |
VMware Composer Server |
7.3.1 |
| VMware |
vCenter Server Appliance |
6.5.0.Build 5973321 |
| VMware |
vSphere ESXi 6.5 Update 1 |
6.5.0. Build 5705665 |
| NetApp |
AFF A300 |
9.1 |
Logical Architecture
The logical architecture of this solution is designed to support up to 5000 users within four Cisco UCS 5108 Blade server chassis containing 27 blades, which provides physical redundancy for the blade servers for each workload type.
Figure 21 outlines the logical architecture of the test environment, including the Login VSI session launcher self-contained end user experience benchmarking platform.
Figure 21 Logical Architecture Overview
This document is intended to allow you to fully configure your environment. In this process, various steps require you to insert customer-specific naming conventions, IP addresses, and VLAN schemes, as well as to record appropriate MAC addresses.
Figure 22 identifies the server roles in the 27 server deployment to support the 5000 seat workload. We also break out the infrastructure virtual machine fault tolerant design.
Figure 22 Server, Location, and Purpose
Table 8 lists the virtual machine deployments on the hardware platform.
Table 8 Virtual Machine Deployment Architecture
| Server Name |
Location |
Purpose |
| C1-Blade 8 C2-Blade 8 |
Physical – Chassis 1, 2 |
ESXi 6.5 Hosts Infrastructure VMs Windows 2016, vCenter Server Appliance, VMware Horizon Connection Servers, Horizon Replica Servers, Horizon Composer Server, Active Directory Domain Controllers, SQL Server and Key Management Server. |
| C1-Blade1-6 C2-Blade 6 |
Physical – Chassis 1, 2 |
ESXi 6.5 Hosts 72x VMware Horizon Server 2016 RDSH Server VMs (1680 RDS Server Sessions) |
| C2-Blade1-5 C3-Blade1-7 C4-Blade1-6 |
Physical – Chassis 2,3, 4 |
ESXi 6.5 Hosts 3320x VMware Horizon VDI (2 Pools consist of Non-Persistent and Persistent virtual machines) VMs |
VLANs
The VLAN configuration recommended for the environment includes a total of seven VLANs as outlined in Table 9.
Table 9 VLANs Configured in this Study
| VLAN Name |
VLAN ID |
VLAN Purpose |
|
| Default |
1 |
Native VLAN |
|
| In-Band-Mgmt. |
60 |
VLAN for in-band management interfaces |
|
| Infra-Mgmt. |
61 |
VLAN for Virtual Infrastructure |
|
| NFS |
62 |
VLAN NFS Traffic |
|
| CIFS |
63 |
VLAN for CIFS Share User Profile |
|
| vMotion |
66 |
VLAN for VMware vMotion |
|
| VDI |
102 |
VLAN for VDI Traffic |
|
| OB-Mgmt. |
164 |
VLAN for out-of-band management interfaces |
|
|
|
|
|
|
VSANs
Two virtual SANs for communications and fault tolerance were used in this design.
Table 10 VASNs Configured in this Study
| VSAN Name |
VSAN Purpose |
ID Used in Validating this Document |
| VSAN 1 |
VSAN for primary SAN communication |
400 |
| VSAN 2 |
VSAN for secondary SAN communication |
401 |
VMware Clusters
The following four VMware Clusters were used in one vCenter data center to support the solution and testing environment:
· VDI Cluster: NetApp AFF A300 storage with Cisco UCS
- Infrastructure Cluster: Infra VMs (vCenter Appliance, Active Directory (2), DNS, DHCP, VMware Horizon Connection Servers, VMware Horizon Replica Servers, VMware Horizon Composer Server, Microsoft SQL Server.
- RDSH: VMware Horizon RDSH (Remote Desktop Server Hosted) VMs (Windows Server 2016 RDS Roles) provisioned with VMware View Composer.
- VDI Non-Persistent: VMware Horizon VDI VMs (Windows 10 64-bit Non-Persistent Instant Clones virtual desktops provisioned.
- VDI Persistent: VMware Horizon VDI VMs (Windows 10 64-bit persistent virtual desktops provisioned with VMware Horizon Composer.
· VSI Launchers Cluster
- Launcher Cluster: Login VSI Cluster (The Login VSI launcher infrastructure was connected using the same set of switches and vCenter instance, but was hosted on separate local storage and servers)
Figure 23 VMware vSphere Clusters on vSphere Web GUI
Solution Configuration
This section details the configuration and tuning that was performed on the individual components to produce a complete, validated solution. Figure 24 illustrates the configuration topology for this solution.
Configuration Topology for Scalable VMware Horizon Mixed Workload
Component Layers
Figure 24 Solution Component Layers
Figure 24 above captures the architectural diagram for the purpose of this study. The architecture is divided into three distinct layers:
· Cisco UCS Compute Platform
· Network Access layer and LAN
· Storage Access to the AFF A300 array
Solution Cabling
The following sections detail the physical connectivity configuration of the FlexPod 5000 seat VMware Horizon 7 environment.
The information in this section is provided as a reference for cabling the physical equipment in this Cisco Validated Design environment. To simplify cabling requirements, the tables include both local and remote device and port locations.
The tables in this section contain the details for the prescribed and supported configuration of the AFF A300 to the Cisco 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnects via Cisco MDS 9148S FC switches.
This document assumes that out-of-band management ports are plugged into an existing management infrastructure at the deployment site. These interfaces will be used in various configuration steps.
Be sure to follow the cabling directions in this section. Failure to do so will result in necessary changes to the deployment procedures that follow because specific port locations are mentioned.
Figure 25 illustrates a cabling diagram for a VMware Horizon configuration using the Cisco Nexus 9000, Cisco MDS 9100 Series, and NetApp AFF A300 array.
Figure 25 FlexPod 5000 Seat Cabling Diagram
Cisco Nexus Switch Cabling Details
Table 11 Cisco Nexus 9372-A Cabling Information
| Local Device |
Local Port |
Connection |
Remote Device |
Remote Port |
|
|
Eth1/51 |
40GbE |
Cisco UCS fabric interconnect A |
Eth1/35 |
| Eth1/52 |
40GbE |
Cisco UCS fabric interconnect B |
Eth1/36 |
|
| Eth1/49 |
40GbE |
Cisco Nexus 9372 B |
Eth1/49 |
|
| Eth1/50 |
40GbE |
Cisco Nexus 9372 B |
Eth1/50 |
|
|
|
MGMT0 |
GbE |
GbE management switch |
Any |
For devices requiring GbE connectivity, use the GbE Copper SFP+s (GLC-T=).
Table 12 Cisco Nexus 9372-B Cabling Information
| Local Device |
Local Port |
Connection |
Remote Device |
Remote Port |
| Cisco Nexus 9372 B
|
Eth1/51 |
40GbE |
Cisco UCS fabric interconnect A |
Eth1/35 |
| Eth1/52 |
40GbE |
Cisco UCS fabric interconnect B |
Eth1/36 |
|
| Eth1/49 |
40GbE |
Cisco Nexus 9372 A |
Eth1/49 |
|
| Eth1/50 |
40GbE |
Cisco Nexus 9372 A |
Eth1/50 |
|
|
|
MGMT0 |
GbE |
GbE management switch |
Any |
Cisco UCS 6332-16UPUP Fabric Interconnect Cabling
Table 13 Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect A Cabling Information
| Local Device |
Local Port |
Connection |
Remote Device |
Remote Port |
| Cisco UCS fabric interconnect A
|
Eth1/35 |
40GbE |
Cisco Nexus 9372 A |
Eth1/51 |
| Eth1/36 |
40GbE |
Cisco Nexus 9372 B |
Eth1/52 |
|
| Eth1/17-1/18 |
40GbE |
UCS 5108 Blade Chassis IOM-A, Chassis 1 |
IOM 1-2 |
|
| Eth1/19-1/20 |
40GbE |
UCS 5108 Blade Chassis IOM-A, Chassis 2 |
IOM 1-2 |
|
| Eth1/21-1/22 |
40GbE |
UCS 5108 Blade Chassis IOM-A, Chassis 3 |
IOM 1-2 |
|
| Eth 1/23-/24 |
40GbE |
UCS 5108 Blade Chassis IOM-A, Chassis 4 |
IOM 1-2 |
|
| MGMT0 |
GbE |
GbE management switch |
Any |
|
| L1 |
GbE |
Cisco UCS fabric interconnect B |
L1 |
|
|
|
L2 |
GbE |
Cisco UCS fabric interconnect B |
L2 |
|
|
FC 1/1 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco MDS 9148S-A |
FC 1/43 |
|
|
FC 1/2 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco MDS 9148S-A |
FC 1/44 |
|
|
FC 1/3 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco MDS 9148S-A |
FC 1/45 |
|
|
FC 1/4 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco MDS 9148S-A |
FC 1/46 |
Table 14 Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect B Cabling Information
| Local Device |
Local Port |
Connection |
Remote Device |
Remote Port |
| Cisco UCS fabric interconnect B
|
Eth1/35 |
40GbE |
Cisco Nexus 9372 A |
Eth1/51 |
| Eth1/36 |
40GbE |
Cisco Nexus 9372 B |
Eth1/52 |
|
| Eth1/17-1/18 |
40GbE |
UCS 5108 Blade Chassis IOM-B, Chassis 1 |
IOM 1-2 |
|
| Eth1/19-1/20 |
40GbE |
UCS 5108 Blade Chassis IOM-B, Chassis 2 |
IOM 1-2 |
|
| Eth1/21-1/22 |
40GbE |
UCS 5108 Blade Chassis IOM-B, Chassis 3 |
IOM 1-2 |
|
| Eth 1/23-1/24 |
40GbE |
UCS 5108 Blade Chassis IOM-B, Chassis 4 |
IOM 1-2 |
|
| L1 |
GbE |
Cisco UCS fabric interconnect B |
L1 |
|
|
|
L2 |
GbE |
Cisco UCS fabric interconnect B |
L2 |
|
|
FC 1/1 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco MDS 9148S-B |
FC 1/43 |
|
|
FC1/2 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco MDS 9148S-B |
FC 1/44 |
|
|
FC 1/3 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco MDS 9148S-B |
FC 1/45 |
|
|
FC 1/4 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco MDS 9148S-B |
FC 1/46 |
Cisco MDS 9148S Cabling
Figure 26 illustrates the cable connectivity between the Cisco MDS 9148S and the Cisco 6332 Fabric Interconnects and the AFF A300 storage.
We used four 16Gb FC connections from each Fabric Interconnect to each MDS switch and utilized two 16Gb FC connections from the AFF A300 storage controller to each MDS switch.
Table 15 Cisco MDS 9148S A Cabling
| Local Device |
Local Port |
Connection |
Remote Device |
Remote Port |
| Cisco MDS 9148S-A
|
fc1/37 |
16Gb FC |
AFF A300-01 |
Port 0g |
| fc1/38 |
16Gb FC |
AFF A300-02 |
Port 0g |
|
|
|
fc1/43 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnect-A |
Fc 1/1 |
|
|
fc1/44 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnect-A |
Fc 1/2 |
|
|
fc1/45 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnect-A |
Fc 1/3 |
|
|
fc1/46 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnect-A |
Fc 1/4 |
Table 16 Cisco MDS 9148S B Cabling
| Local Device |
Local Port |
Connection |
Remote Device |
Remote Port |
| Cisco MDS 9148S-B
|
fc1/37 |
16Gb FC |
AFF A300-01 |
Port 0h |
| fc1/38 |
16Gb FC |
AFF A300-02 |
Port 0h |
|
| fc1/43 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco 6332-16UPUP Fabric Interconnect-B |
Fc 2/1 |
|
| fc1/44 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco 6332-16UPUP Fabric Interconnect-B |
Fc 2/2 |
|
| fc1/45 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco 6332-16UPUP Fabric Interconnect-B |
Fc 2/3 |
|
| fc1/46 |
16Gb FC |
Cisco 6332-16UPUP Fabric Interconnect-B |
Fc 3/4 |
AFF A300 to MDS SAN Fabric Connectivity
Figure 27 illustrates the NetApp AFF- MDS A and B Switches using VSAN 400 for Fabric A and VSAN 401 Configured for Fabric B.
Figure 27 AFF A300 storage connectivity to Cisco MDS FC Switches
Figure 28 Fibre Channel Cable Connectivity from AFF A300 to Cisco MDS 9148S to Cisco 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnects
Cisco Unified Computing System Base Configuration
This section details the Cisco UCS configuration that was done as part of the infrastructure build out. The racking, power, and installation of the chassis are described in the Installation guide (see www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/servers-unified-computing/ucs-manager/products-installation-guides-list.html) and it is beyond the scope of this document.
For more information about each step, refer to the following documents: Cisco UCS Manager Configuration Guides – GUI and Command Line Interface (CLI) Cisco UCS Manager - Configuration Guides - Cisco
Cisco UCS Manager Software Version 3.2(1d)
This document assumes the use of Cisco UCS Manager Software version 3.2(1d). To upgrade the Cisco UCS Manager software and the Cisco UCS 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnect software to a higher version of the firmware,) refer to Cisco UCS Manager Install and Upgrade Guides.
Configure Fabric Interconnects at Console
To configure the fabric interconnect, complete the following steps:
1. Connect a console cable to the console port on what will become the primary fabric interconnect.
2. If the fabric interconnects was previously deployed and you want to erase it to redeploy, follow these steps:
a. Login with the existing user name and password
b. Enter: connect local-mgmt
c. Enter: erase config
d. Enter: yes to confirm
3. After the fabric interconnect restarts, the out-of-box first time installation prompt appears, type “console” and press Enter.
4. Type “setup” at the setup/restore prompt, then press Enter.
5. Type “y” then press Enter to confirm the setup.
6. Type “y” or “n” depending on your organization’s security policies, then press Enter.
7. Enter and confirm the password and enter switch Fabric A.
8. Complete the setup dialog questions.
9. Review the selections and type “yes”.
10. Console onto second fabric interconnect, select console as the configuration method and provide the following inputs.
11. Open a web browser and go to the Virtual IP address configured above.
Base Cisco UCS System Configuration
To configure the Cisco Unified Computing System, complete the following steps:
1. Open a web browser and navigate to the Cisco UCS 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnect cluster address.
2. Click the Launch UCS Manager link to download the Cisco UCS Manager software.
3. If prompted to accept security certificates, accept as necessary.
4. When prompted, enter admin as the user name and enter the administrative password.
5. To log in to Cisco UCS Manager, click Login.
Set Fabric Interconnects to Fibre Channel End Host Mode
To set the Fabric Interconnects to the Fibre Channel End Host Mode, complete the following steps:
1. On the Equipment tab, expand the Fabric Interconnects node and click Fabric Interconnect A.
2. On the General tab in the Actions pane, click Set FC End Host mode.
3. Follow the dialogs to complete the change.
Both Fabric Interconnects automatically reboot sequentially when you confirm you want to operate in this mode.
Configure Fibre Channel Uplink Ports
To configure the Fibre Channel Uplink Ports, complete the following steps:
1. After the restarts are complete, from the General tab, Actions pane, click Configure Unified ports.
2. Click Yes to confirm in the pop-up window.
3. Click Configure Expansion Module Ports.
4. Move the slider to the left.
Ports to the right of the slider will become FC ports. For our study, we configured the last four ports on the Expansion Module as FC ports.
5. Click Finish, then click Yes to confirm. This action will cause a reboot of the Expansion Module.
After the expansion module reboot, your FC Ports configuration should look like the screenshot below:
6. Repeat this procedure for Fabric Interconnect B.
7. Insert Cisco SFP 16 Gbps FC (DS-SFP-FC16-SW) modules into ports 1 through 4 on both Fabric Interconnects and cable as prescribed later in this document.
Edit Chassis Discovery Policy
Setting the discovery policy simplifies the addition of B-Series Cisco UCS chassis.
To modify the chassis discovery policy, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, in the navigation pane, click the Equipment node and select Equipment in the list on the left.
2. In the right pane, click the Policies tab.
3. Under Global Policies, set the Chassis/FEX Discovery Policy to 2-link.
4. Set the Link Grouping Preference to Port Channel.
5. Click Save Changes.
6. Click OK.
Acknowledge Cisco UCS Chassis
To acknowledge all Cisco UCS chassis, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, in the navigation pane, click the Equipment tab.
2. Expand Chassis and select each chassis that is listed.
3. Right-click each chassis and select Acknowledge Chassis.
4. Click Yes and then click OK to complete acknowledging the chassis.
5. Repeat for each of the remaining chassis.
Synchronize Cisco UCS to NTP
To synchronize the Cisco UCS environment to the NTP server, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, in the navigation pane, click the Admin tab.
2. Select All > Timezone Management.
3. In the Properties pane, select the appropriate time zone in the Timezone menu.
4. Click Save Changes and then click OK.
5. Click Add NTP Server.
6. Enter the NTP server IP address and click OK.
7. Click OK.
Enable Server and Ethernet Uplink Ports
To enable server and uplink ports, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, in the navigation pane, click the Equipment tab.
2. Select Equipment > Fabric Interconnects > Fabric Interconnect A > Fixed Module.
3. Expand Ethernet Ports.
4. Select ports 17 through 24 that are connected to the Cisco IO Modules of the four B-Series 5108 Chassis, right-click them, and select Configure as Server Port.
5. Click Yes to confirm uplink ports and click OK.
6. In the left pane, navigate to Fabric Interconnect A. In the right pane, navigate to the Physical Ports tab > Ethernet Ports tab. Confirm that ports have been configured correctly in the in the Role column.
7. Repeat the above steps for Fabric Interconnect B. The screenshot below shows the server ports for Fabric B.
To configure network ports used to uplink the Fabric Interconnects to the Cisco Nexus 9172PX switches, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, in the navigation pane, click the Equipment tab.
2. Select Equipment > Fabric Interconnects > Fabric Interconnect A > Fixed Module.
3. Expand Ethernet Ports.
4. Select ports 35 through 36 that are connected to the Nexus 9372PX switches, right-click them, and select Configure as Network Port.
5. Click Yes to confirm ports and click OK.
6. In the left pane, navigate to Fabric Interconnect A. In the right pane, navigate to the Physical Ports tab > Ethernet Ports tab. Confirm that ports have been configured correctly in the in the Role column.
7. Verify the Ports connected to Cisco Nexus upstream switches are now configured as network ports.
8. Successful configuration should result in ports 35-36 configured as network ports as shown in the screen shot below:
9. Repeat the above steps for Fabric Interconnect B. The screenshot shows the network uplink ports for Fabric B.
Create Uplink Port Channels to Cisco Nexus 9372PX Switches
In this procedure, two port channels are created: one from Fabric A to both Cisco Nexus 9372PX switches and one from Fabric B to both Cisco Nexus 9372PX switches.
To configure the necessary port channels in the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the LAN tab in the navigation pane.
2. Under LAN > LAN Cloud, expand node Fabric A tree:
3. Right-click Port Channels.
4. Select Create Port Channel.
5. Enter 11 as the unique ID of the port channel.
6. Enter FI-A-Uplink as the name of the port channel.
7. Click Next.
8. Select ethernet ports 35-36 for the port channel.
9. Click Finish.
Repeat steps 1-9 for Fabric Interconnect B, substituting 12 for the port channel number and FI-B-Uplink for the name. The configuration should look like the screenshot below:
Create Uplink Port Channels to Cisco MDS 9148S Switches
In this procedure, two port channels are created: One from Fabric A to Cisco MDS 9148S switch A and one from Fabric B to Cisco MDS 9148S switch B.
To configure the necessary port channels in the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the SAN tab in the navigation pane.
2. Under SAN > SAN Cloud, right-click Fabric A Create Resource Pools.
Create Required Shared Resource Pools
This section details how to create the MAC address, iSCSI IQN, iSCSI IP, UUID suffix and server pools.
Create MAC Address Pools
To configure the necessary MAC address pools for the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the LAN tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Pools > root.
3. Right-click MAC Pools under the root organization.
4. Select Create MAC Pool to create the MAC address pool.
5. Enter MAC_Pool_A as the name for MAC pool.
6. Optional: Enter a description for the MAC pool.
7. Enter the seed MAC address and provide the number of MAC addresses to be provisioned.
8. Click OK, then click Finish.
9. In the confirmation message, click OK.
Create KVM IP Address Pool
An IP address pool on the out of band management network must be created to facilitate KVM access to each compute node in the Cisco UCS domain.
To create the pool, complete the following steps:
1. Click the LAN tab in UCS Manager, expand the Pools node, expand the root node, right-click IP Pools, then click Create IP Pool.
2. Provide a Name, choose Default or Sequential, and then click Next.
3. Click the green + sign to add an IPv4 address block.
4. Complete the starting IP address, size, subnet mask, default gateway, primary and secondary DNS values for your network, then click OK.
5. Click Finish.
6. Click OK.
Create WWPN Pools
To configure the necessary WWPN pools for the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the SAN tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Pools > root.
3. Under WWPN Pools, right click WWPN Pools and select Create WWPN Pool.
4. Assign a name and optional description.
5. Assignment order can remain Default.
6. Click Next.
7. Click Add to add block of Ports.
8. Enter number of WWNNs. For this study we had 32 WWNNs.
9. Click Finish.
Create UUID Suffix Pool
To configure the necessary universally unique identifier (UUID) suffix pool for the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the Servers tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Pools > root.
3. Right-click UUID Suffix Pools.
4. Select Create UUID Suffix Pool.
5. Enter UUID_Pool-VDI as the name of the UUID suffix pool.
6. Optional: Enter a description for the UUID suffix pool.
7. Keep the prefix at the derived option.
8. Click Next.
9. Click Add to add a block of UUIDs.
10. Create a starting point UUID seed for your environment.
11. Specify a size for the UUID block that is sufficient to support the available blade or server resources.
Create Server Pool
To configure the necessary server pool for the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
Consider creating unique server pools to achieve the granularity that is required in your environment.
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the Servers tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Pools > root.
3. Right-click Server Pools.
4. Select Create Server Pool.
5. Enter Infra_Pool as the name of the server pool.
6. Optional: Enter a description for the server pool.
7. Click Next.
8. Select two (or more) servers to be used for the VMware management cluster and click >> to add them to the Infra_Pool server pool.
9. Click Finish.
10. Click OK.
11. Create additional Server Pools for Horizon Linked Clone servers and Horizon RDSH servers
Create VLANs
To configure the necessary virtual local area networks (VLANs) for the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the LAN tab in the navigation pane.
In this procedure, eight unique VLANs are created. Refer to Table 17.
| VLAN Name |
VLAN ID |
VLAN Purpose |
vNIC Assignment |
| Default |
1 |
Native VLAN |
vNIC-Template-A vNIC-Template-B |
| In-Band-Mgmt |
60 |
VLAN for in-band management interfaces |
vNIC-Template-A vNIC-Template-B |
| Infra-Mgmt |
61 |
VLAN for Virtual Infrastructure |
vNIC-Template-A vNIC-Template-B |
| NFS-Vlan |
62 |
VLAN for NFS Share |
vNIC-Template-A vNIC-Template-B |
| CIFS-Vlan |
63 |
VLAN-CIFS Share User Profiles |
vNIC-Template-A vNIC-Template-B |
| vMotion |
66 |
VLAN for VMware vMotion |
vNIC-Template-A vNIC-Template-B |
| VDI |
102 |
Virtual Desktop traffic |
vNIC-Template-A vNIC-Template-B |
| OB-Mgmt |
164 |
VLAN for out-of-band management interfaces |
vNIC-Template-A vNIC-Template-B |
2. Select LAN > LAN Cloud.
3. Right-click VLANs.
4. Select Create VLANs
5. Enter MGMT as the name of the VLAN to be used for in-band management traffic.
6. Keep the Common/Global option selected for the scope of the VLAN.
7. Enter 60 as the ID of the management VLAN.
8. Keep the Sharing Type as None.
9. Click OK and then click OK again.
10. Repeat the above steps to create all VLANs and configure the Default VLAN as native.
Create VSANs
To configure the necessary virtual storage area networks (VSANs) for the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the SAN tab in the navigation pane.
In this procedure, two VSANs are created. When these VSANs are created, be sure to add them to the port-channel uplink created earlier.
2. Select SAN > SAN Cloud.
3. Under Fabric A, right-click VSANs.
4. Select Create VSANs.
5. Enter VSAN-400-A as the name of the VSAN to be used for in-band management traffic.
6. Select Fabric A for the scope of the VSAN.
7. Enter 400 as the ID of the VSAN.
8. Click OK, and then click OK again.
9. Repeat the above steps on Fabric B with VSAN-401-B to create the VSANs necessary for this solution.
VSAN 400 and 401 are configured as shown below:
10. After configuring VSANs both sides, go into the port-channel created earlier in the section ‘Create uplinks for MDS 9148S and add the respective VSANs to their port channels. VSAN400 in this study is assigned to Fabric A and VSAN401 is assigned to Fabric B. (VSAN400 should only be on Fabric A and VSAN401 on Fabric B).
11. Go to the Port-Channel for each Fabric and assign the VSAN appropriately.
Create Host Firmware Package
Firmware management policies allow the administrator to select the corresponding packages for a given server configuration. These policies often include packages for adapter, BIOS, board controller, FC adapters, host bus adapter (HBA) option ROM, and storage controller properties.
To create a firmware management policy for a given server configuration in the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the Servers tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Policies > root.
3. Right-click Host Firmware Packages.
4. Select Create Host Firmware Package.
5. Enter VM-Host as the name of the host firmware package.
6. Leave Simple selected.
7. Select the version 3.2(1d) for both the Blade Package
8. Click OK to create the host firmware package.
Set Jumbo Frames in Cisco UCS Fabric
To configure jumbo frames and enable quality of service in the Cisco UCS fabric, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the LAN tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select LAN > LAN Cloud > QoS System Class.
3. In the right pane, click the General tab.
4. On the Best Effort row, enter 9216 in the box under the MTU column.
5. Click Save Changes in the bottom of the window.
6. Click OK.
Create Network Control Policy for Cisco Discovery Protocol
To create a network control policy that enables Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) on virtual network ports, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the LAN tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Policies > root.
3. Right-click Network Control Policies.
4. Select Create Network Control Policy.
5. Enter Enable_CDP as the policy name.
6. For CDP, select the Enabled option.
7. Click OK to create the network control policy.
Create Power Control Policy
To create a power control policy for the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the Servers tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Policies > root.
3. Right-click Power Control Policies.
4. Select Create Power Control Policy.
5. Enter No-Power-Cap as the power control policy name.
6. Change the power capping setting to No Cap.
7. Click OK to create the power control policy.
Cisco UCS System Configuration for Cisco UCS B-Series
Create Server BIOS Policy
To create a server BIOS policy for the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the Servers tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Policies > root.
3. Right-click BIOS Policies.
4. Select Create BIOS Policy.
5. Enter B200-M5-BIOS as the BIOS policy name.
6. Configure the remaining BIOS policies as follows and click Finish.
7. Click Finish.
Configure Update Default Maintenance Policy
To update the default Maintenance Policy, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the Servers tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Policies > root.
3. Select Maintenance Policies > default.
4. Change the Reboot Policy to User Ack.
5. Click Save Changes.
6. Click OK to accept the change.
Create vNIC Templates for Cisco UCS B-Series
To create multiple virtual network interface card (vNIC) templates for the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the LAN tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Policies > root.
3. Right-click vNIC Templates.
4. Select Create vNIC Template.
5. Enter vNIC_Template_A as the vNIC template name.
6. Keep Fabric A selected.
7. Do not select the Enable Failover checkbox.
8. Under Target, make sure that the VM checkbox is not selected.
9. Select Updating Template as the Template Type.
10. Under VLANs, select the checkboxes for MGMT, Default, Infra, VDI and vMotion.
11. Set Native-VLAN as the native VLAN.
12. For MTU, enter 9000.
13. In the MAC Pool list, select MAC_Pool_A.
14. In the Network Control Policy list, select CDP_Enabled.
15. Click OK to create the vNIC template.
16. Click OK.
17. In the navigation pane, select the LAN tab.
18. Select Policies > root.
19. Right-click vNIC Templates.
20. Select Create vNIC Template.
21. Enter vNIC_Template_B as the vNIC template name.
22. Select Fabric B.
23. Do not select the Enable Failover checkbox.
24. Under Target, make sure the VM checkbox is not selected.
25. Select Updating Template as the template type.
26. Under VLANs, select the checkboxes for MGMT, Default, VDI, Infra, and vMotion.
27. Set Native-VLAN as the native VLAN.
28. For MTU, enter 9000.
29. In the MAC Pool list, select MAC_Pool_B.
30. In the Network Control Policy list, select CDP_Enabled.
31. Click OK to create the vNIC template.
32. Click OK.
Create vHBA Templates for Cisco UCS B-Series
To create multiple virtual host bus adapter (vHBA) templates for the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. In Cisco UCS Manager, click the SAN tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Policies > root.
3. Right-click vHBA Templates.
4. Select Create vHBA Template.
5. Enter vHBA-FAB-A as the vHBA template name.
6. Keep Fabric A selected.
7. Select VSAN-400-A for Fabric A from the drop down.
8. Change to Updating Template.
9. For Max Data Field keep 2048.
10. Select VDI-WWPN (created earlier) for our WWPN Pool.
11. Leave the remaining as is.
12. Click OK.
13. In the navigation pane, select the LAN tab.
14. Select Policies > root.
15. Right-click vHBA Templates.
16. Select Create vHBA Template.
17. Enter vHBA-FAB-B as the vHBA template name.
18. Select Fabric B.
19. Select VSAN-401-B for Fabric B from the drop down.
20. Change to Updating Template.
21. For Max Data Field keep 2048.
22. Select VDI-Pool-WWPN (created earlier) for our WWPN Pool.
23. Leave the remaining as is.
24. Click OK.
Configure Boot from SAN
All ESXi host were set to boot from SAN for the Cisco Validated Design as part of the Service Profile template. The benefits of booting from SAN are numerous; disaster recovery, lower cooling and power requirements for each server since a local drive is not required, and better performance, name just a few.
To create a boot from SAN policy, complete the following steps:
1. Go to UCS Manager, right-click the ‘Boot Policies’ option shown below and select ‘Create Boot Policy.'
2. Name the boot policy and expand the ‘vHBAs’ menu as shown below:
3. After selecting the ‘Add SAN Boot’ option, add the primary vHBA as shown below. Note that the vHBA name needs to match exactly. We will use the vHBA templates created in the previous step.
4. Repeat the steps to add a secondary SAN Boot option.
5. Add the SAN Boot Targets to the primary and secondary. The SAN boot targets will also include primary and secondary options in order to maximize resiliency and number of paths.
6. Using the following command, find and record the WWPN for each FC LIF:
Network interface show -vserver <vserver> -data-protocol fcp
7. When the AFF A300 WWNs have been recorded, use fcp_01a for the first Boot Target WWPN:
8. Add a secondary SAN Boot Target by clicking Add SAN Boot Target to SAN Primary while the primary SAN Boot option is highlighted. This time enter the AFF A300 WWPN for fcp_02a.
9. Repeat these steps for the secondary SAN boot target and use WWPN fcp_01b and fcp_02b in the primary and secondary SAN boot options.
10. For information about configuring boot and data LUNs on the NetApp A300 storage system, please refer to section NetApp A300 Storage System Configuration.
Create Service Profile Templates for Cisco UCS B-Series
To create service profile templates for the Cisco UCS B-Series environment, complete the following steps:
1. Under the Servers tab in UCSM Select Service Profile Templates.
2. Right-click and select Create Service Profile Template.
3. Name the template B-Series.
4. Select the UUID pool created earlier from the dropdown in the UUID Assignment dialog.
5. Click Next.
6. Click Next through Storage Provisioning.
7. Under Networking, in the “How would you like to configure LAN connectivity?” dialogue, select the Expert radio button.
8. Click Add.
9. Name it vNIC-A.
10. Select check box for Use vNIC Template.
11. Under vNIC template select the vNIC-A.
12. For Adapter Policy select VMware.
13. Repeat networking steps for vNIC-B.
14. Click Next.
15. Click Next.
16. Under SAN Connectivity, select the Expert button in the “How would you like to configure SAN Connectivity?
17. Select WWNN Assignment from the Pool created earlier.
18. Click Add.
19. Name the adapter vHBA-A.
20. Click Use vHBA Template.
21. Select vHBA Template: vHBA-A.
22. Select Adapter Policy: VMWare.
23. Repeat steps for vHBA-B on Fabric B.
24. No Zoning will be used. Click Next.
25. Click Next through vNIC/vHBA Placement policy.
26. Click Next through vMedia Policy.
27. Use the Boot Policy drop-down list to select the Boot Policy created earlier, then click Finish.
28. Select maintenance Policy and Server Assignment.
29. Click Finish and complete the Service Profile creation.
Create Service Profiles
To create service profiles for each of the blades in the NetApp solution, complete the following steps:
1. From the Servers tab in UCS Manager, under the Service Profile Templates node, right-click the Service Profile Template created in the previous step, then click Create Service Profiles from Template.
2. Provide a naming prefix, a starting number, and the number of services profiles to create, then click OK.
The requested number of service profiles (for example, 25) are created in the Service Profiles root organization.
NetApp A300 Storage System Configuration
The following section includes instructions on the steps necessary to perform initial setup and configuration of the NetApp A300 storage system. Specific details of the configuration as tested can be found in the NetApp A300 Storage Architecture Design section below.
NetApp All Flash FAS A300 Controllers
See the following sections (NetApp Hardware Universe) for planning the physical location of the storage systems:
· Site Preparation
· System Connectivity Requirements
· Circuit Breaker, Power Outlet Balancing, System Cabinet Power Cord Plugs, and Console Pinout Requirements
· AFF Systems
NetApp Hardware Universe
1. Confirm that the hardware and software components that you would like to use are supported with the version of ONTAP that you plan to install by using the HWU application at the NetApp Support site.
2. Access the HWU application to view the System Configuration guides. Click the Controllers tab to view the compatibility between different version of the ONTAP software and the NetApp storage appliances with your desired specifications.
3. Alternatively, to compare components by storage appliance, click Compare Storage Systems.
Controllers
Follow the physical installation procedures for the controllers found in the AFF A300 Series product documentation at the NetApp Support site.
Disk Shelves
NetApp storage systems support a wide variety of disk shelves and disk drives. The complete list of disk shelves that are supported by the AFF A300 is available at the NetApp Support site.
When using SAS disk shelves with NetApp storage controllers, refer to the SAS Disk Shelves Universal SAS and ACP Cabling Guide for cabling guidelines.
NetApp ONTAP 9.1
Complete Configuration Worksheet
Before running the setup script, complete the cluster setup worksheet from the ONTAP 9.1 Software Setup Guide. You must have access to the NetApp Support site to open the cluster setup worksheet.
Configure ONTAP Nodes
Before running the setup script, review the configuration worksheets in the ONTAP 9.1 Software Setup Guide to learn about configuring ONTAP. Table 18 lists the information needed to configure two ONTAP nodes. Customize the cluster detail values with the information applicable to your deployment.
Table 18 ONTAP Software Installation Prerequisites
| Cluster Detail |
Cluster Detail Value |
| Cluster node 01 IP address |
<node01-mgmt-ip> |
| Cluster node 01 netmask |
<node01-mgmt-mask> |
| Cluster node 01 gateway |
<node01-mgmt-gateway> |
| Cluster node 02 IP address |
<node02-mgmt-ip> |
| Cluster node 02 netmask |
<node02-mgmt-mask> |
| Cluster node 02 gateway |
<node02-mgmt-gateway> |
| ONTAP 9.1 URL |
<url-boot-software> |
Configure Node 01
To configure node 01, complete the following steps:
1. Connect to the storage system console port. You should see a Loader-A prompt. However, if the storage system is in a reboot loop, press Ctrl-C to exit the autoboot loop when the following message displays:
Starting AUTOBOOT press Ctrl-C to abort…
2. Allow the system to boot up.
autoboot
3. Press Ctrl-C when prompted.
If ONTAP 9.1 is not the version of software being booted, continue with the following steps to install new software. If ONTAP 9.1 is the version being booted, select option 8 and y to reboot the node. Then continue with step 14.
4. To install new software, select option 7.
5. Enter y to perform an upgrade.
6. Select e0M for the network port you want to use for the download.
7. Enter y to reboot now.
8. Enter the IP address, netmask, and default gateway for e0M.
<node01-mgmt-ip> <node01-mgmt-mask> <node01-mgmt-gateway>
9. Enter the URL where the software can be found.
This web server must be pingable.
<url-boot-software>
10. Press Enter for the user name, indicating no user name.
11. Enter y to set the newly installed software as the default to be used for subsequent reboots.
12. Enter y to reboot the node.
When installing new software, the system might perform firmware upgrades to the BIOS and adapter cards, causing reboots and possible stops at the Loader-A prompt. If these actions occur, the system might deviate from this procedure.
13. Press Ctrl-C when the following message displays:
Press Ctrl-C for Boot Menu
14. Select option 4 for Clean Configuration and Initialize All Disks.
15. Enter y to zero disks, reset config, and install a new file system.
16. Enter y to erase all the data on the disks.
The initialization and creation of the root aggregate can take 90 minutes or more to complete, depending on the number and type of disks attached. When initialization is complete, the storage system reboots. Note that SSDs take considerably less time to initialize. You can continue with the node 02 configuration while the disks for node 01 are zeroing.
Configure Node 02
To configure node 02, complete the following steps:
1. Connect to the storage system console port. You should see a Loader-A prompt. However, if the storage system is in a reboot loop, press Ctrl-C to exit the autoboot loop when the following message displays:
Starting AUTOBOOT press Ctrl-C to abort…
2. Allow the system to boot up.
autoboot
3. Press Ctrl-C when prompted.
If ONTAP 9.1 is not the version of software being booted, continue with the following steps to install new software. If ONTAP 9.1 is the version being booted, select option 8 and y to reboot the node. Then continue with step 14.
4. To install new software, select option 7.
5. Enter y to perform an upgrade.
6. Select e0M for the network port you want to use for the download.
7. Enter y to reboot now.
8. Enter the IP address, netmask, and default gateway for e0M.
<node02-mgmt-ip> <node02-mgmt-mask> <node02-mgmt-gateway>
9. Enter the URL where the software can be found.
This web server must be pingable.
<url-boot-software>
10. Press Enter for the user name, indicating no user name.
11. Enter y to set the newly installed software as the default to be used for subsequent reboots.
12. Enter y to reboot the node.
When installing new software, the system might perform firmware upgrades to the BIOS and adapter cards, causing reboots and possible stops at the Loader-A prompt. If these actions occur, the system might deviate from this procedure.
13. Press Ctrl-C when you see this message:
Press Ctrl-C for Boot Menu
14. Select option 4 for Clean Configuration and Initialize All Disks.
15. Enter y to zero disks, reset config, and install a new file system.
16. Enter y to erase all the data on the disks.
The initialization and creation of the root aggregate can take 90 minutes or more to complete, depending on the number and type of disks attached. When initialization is complete, the storage system reboots. Note that SSDs take considerably less time to initialize.
Set Up Node
From a console port program attached to the storage controller A (node 01) console port, run the node setup script. This script appears when ONTAP 9.1 boots on the node for the first time.
1. Follow the prompts to set up node 01:
Welcome to node setup.
You can enter the following commands at any time:
"help" or "?" - if you want to have a question clarified,
"back" - if you want to change previously answered questions, and
"exit" or "quit" - if you want to quit the setup wizard.
Any changes you made before quitting will be saved.
You can return to cluster setup at any time by typing “cluster setup”.
To accept a default or omit a question, do not enter a value.
This system will send event messages and weekly reports to NetApp Technical Support.
To disable this feature, enter "autosupport modify -support disable" within 24 hours.
Enabling AutoSupport can significantly speed problem determination and resolution should a problem occur on your system.
For further information on AutoSupport, see:
http://support.netapp.com/autosupport/
Type yes to confirm and continue {yes}: yes
Enter the node management interface port [e0M]: Enter
Enter the node management interface IP address: <node01-mgmt-ip>
Enter the node management interface netmask: <node01-mgmt-mask>
Enter the node management interface default gateway: <node01-mgmt-gateway>
A node management interface on port e0M with IP address <node01-mgmt-ip> has been created
Use your web browser to complete cluster setup by accesing https://<node01-mgmt-ip>
Otherwise press Enter to complete cluster setup using the command line interface:
2. To complete the cluster setup, open a web browser and navigate to https://<node01-mgmt-ip.
Table 19 Cluster Create in ONTAP Prerequisites
| Cluster Detail |
Cluster Detail Value |
| Cluster name |
<clustername> |
| ONTAP base license |
<cluster-base-license-key> |
| Cluster management IP address |
<clustermgmt-ip> |
| Cluster management netmask |
<clustermgmt-mask> |
| Cluster management gateway |
<clustermgmt-gateway> |
| Cluster node 01 IP address |
<node01-mgmt-ip> |
| Cluster node 01 netmask |
<node01-mgmt-mask> |
| Cluster node 01 gateway |
<node01-mgmt-gateway> |
| Cluster node 02 IP address |
<node02-mgmt-ip> |
| Cluster node 02 netmask |
<node02-mgmt-mask> |
| Cluster node 02 gateway |
<node02-mgmt-gateway> |
| Node 01 service processor IP address |
<node01-SP-ip> |
| Node 02 service processor IP address |
<node02-SP-ip> |
| DNS domain name |
<dns-domain-name> |
| DNS server IP address |
<dns-ip> |
| NTP server IP address |
<ntp-ip> |
Cluster setup can also be done using command line interface. This document describes the cluster setup using NetApp System Manager guided setup.
3. Click Guided Setup on the Welcome screen.
4. In the Cluster screen, do the following:
a. Enter the cluster and node names.
b. Select the cluster configuration.
c. Enter and confirm the password.
d. (Optional) Enter the cluster base and feature licenses.
The nodes are discovered automatically; if they are not, click the Refresh link. By default, the cluster interfaces will be created on all the new factory shipping storage controllers.
If all the nodes are not discovered, then configure the cluster using the command line.
Cluster license and feature licenses can also be installed after completing the cluster creation.
5. Click Submit.
6. In the network page, complete the following sections:
· Cluster Management
- Enter the IP address, netmask, gateway and port details.
· Node Management
- Enter the node management IP addresses and port details for all the nodes.
· Service Processor Management
- Enter the IP addresses for all the nodes.
· DNS Details
- Enter the DNS domain names and server address.
· NTP Details
- Enter the primary and alternate NTP server.
7. Click Submit.
8. In the Support page, configure the AutoSupport and Event Notifications sections.
9. Click Submit.
10. In the Summary page, review the configuration details if needed.
The node management interface can be on the same subnet as the cluster management interface, or it can be on a different subnet. In this document, we assume that it is on the same subnet.
Log into the Cluster
To log in to the cluster, complete the following steps:
1. Open an SSH connection to either the cluster IP or host name.
2. Log in to the admin user with the password you provided earlier.
Zero All Spare Disks
To zero all spare disks in the cluster, run the following command:
disk zerospares
Advanced Data Partitioning creates a root partition and two data partitions on each SSD drive in an All Flash FAS configuration. Disk auto assign should have assigned one data partition to each node in an HA pair. If a different disk assignment is required, disk auto assignment must be disabled on both nodes in the HA pair by running the disk option modify command. Spare partitions can then be moved from one node to another by running the disk removeowner and disk assign commands.
Set Onboard Unified Target Adapter 2 Port Personality
To set the personality of the onboard unified target adapter 2 (UTA2), complete the following steps:
1. Verify the Current Mode and Current Type properties of the ports by running the ucadmin show command:
ucadmin show
Current Current Pending Pending Admin
Node Adapter Mode Type Mode Type Status
------------ ------- ------- --------- ------- --------- -----------
<st-node01>
0e cna target - - online
<st-node01>
0f cna target - - online
<st-node01>
0g fc target - - online
<st-node01>
0h fc target - - online
<st-node02>
0e cna target - - online
<st-node02>
0f cna target - - online
<st-node02>
0g fc target - - online
<st-node02>
0h fc target - - online
8 entries were displayed.
2. Verify that the Current Mode and Current Type properties for all ports are set properly. Ports 0g and 0h are used for FC connectivity and should be set to mode fc if not already configured. The port type for all proto-cols should be set to target. Change the port personality by running the following command:
ucadmin modify -node <home-node-of-the-port> -adapter <port-name> -mode fc -type target
The ports must be offline to run this command. To take an adapter offline, run the fcp adapter modify –node <home-node-of-the-port> -adapter <port-name> -state down command. Ports must be converted in pairs (for example, 0e and 0f).
After conversion, a reboot is required. After reboot, bring the ports online by running fcp adapter modify -node <home-node-of-the-port> -adapter <port-name> -state up.
Set Auto-Revert on Cluster Management
To set the auto-revert parameter on the cluster management interface, complete the following step:
A storage virtual machine (SVM) is referred to as a Vserver (or vserver) in the GUI and CLI.
Run the following command:
network interface modify –vserver <clustername> -lif cluster_mgmt –auto-revert true
Set Up Management Broadcast Domain
By default, all network ports are included in the default broadcast domain. Network ports used for data services (for example, e0d, e2a, and e2e) should be removed from the default broadcast domain, leaving just the management network ports (e0c and e0M). To perform this task, run the following commands:
broadcast-domain remove-ports -broadcast-domain Default -ports <st-node01>:e0d, <st-node01>:e0e, <st-node01>:e0e, <st-node01>:e2a, <st-node01>:e2e, <st-node02>:e0d, <st-node02>:e0e, <st-node02>:e0f, <st-node02>:e2a, <st-node02>:e2e
broadcast-domain show
Set Up Service Processor Network Interface
To assign a static IPv4 address to the service processor on each node, run the following commands:
system service-processor network modify –node <st-node01> -address-family IPv4 –enable true –dhcp none –ip-address <node01-sp-ip> -netmask <node01-sp-mask> -gateway <node01-sp-gateway>
system service-processor network modify –node <st-node02> -address-family IPv4 –enable true –dhcp none –ip-address <node02-sp-ip> -netmask <node02-sp-mask> -gateway <node02-sp-gateway>
The service processor IP addresses should be in the same subnet as the node management IP addresses.
Create Aggregates
An aggregate containing the root volume is created during the ONTAP setup process. To create additional aggregates, determine the aggregate name, the node on which to create it, and the number of disks it should contain.
This solution was validated using 1 data aggregate on each controller, with 23 data partitions per aggregate. To create the required aggregates, run the following commands:
aggr create -aggregate aggr1_node01 -node <st-node01> -diskcount 23
aggr create -aggregate aggr1_node02 -node <st-node02> -diskcount 23
You should have the minimum number of hot spare disks for hot spare disk partitions recommended for your aggregate.
For all flash aggregates, you should have a minimum of one hot spare disk or disk partition. For nonflash homogenous aggregates, you should have a minimum of two hot spare disks or disk partitions. For NetApp Flash Pool™ aggregates, you should have a minimum of two hot spare disks or disk partitions for each disk type.
The aggregate cannot be created until disk zeroing completes. Run the aggr show command to display aggregate creation status. Do not proceed until both aggr1_node1 and aggr1_node2 are online.
aggr show
aggr rename –aggregate aggr0 –newname <node01-rootaggrname>
Verify Storage Failover
To confirm that storage failover is enabled, run the following commands for a failover pair:
1. Verify the status of the storage failover.
storage failover show
Both <st-node01> and <st-node02> must be capable of performing a takeover. Continue with step 3 if the nodes are capable of performing a takeover.
2. Enable failover on one of the two nodes.
storage failover modify -node <st-node01> -enabled true
Enabling failover on one node enables it for both nodes.
3. Verify the HA status for a two-node cluster.
This step is not applicable for clusters with more than two nodes.
cluster ha show
4. Continue with step 6 if high availability is configured.
5. Only enable HA mode for two-node clusters. Do not run this command for clusters with more than two nodes because it causes problems with failover.
cluster ha modify -configured true
Do you want to continue? {y|n}: y
6. Verify that hardware assist is correctly configured and, if needed, modify the partner IP address.
storage failover hwassist show
storage failover modify –hwassist-partner-ip <node02-mgmt-ip> -node <st-node01>
storage failover modify –hwassist-partner-ip <node01-mgmt-ip> -node <st-node02>
Disable Flow Control on 10GbE and 40GbE Ports
NetApp recommends disabling flow control on all the 10GbE and UTA2 ports that are connected to external devices. To disable flow control, complete the following steps:
1. Run the following commands to configure node 01:
network port modify -node <st-node01> -port e0a,e0b,e0e,e0f,e0g,e0h,e2a,e2e -flowcontrol-admin none
Warning: Changing the network port settings will cause a several second interruption in carrier.
Do you want to continue? {y|n}: y
2. Run the following commands to configure node 02:
network port modify -node <st-node02> -port e0a,e0b,e0e,e0f,e0g,e0h,e2a,e2e -flowcontrol-admin none
Warning: Changing the network port settings will cause a several second interruption in carrier.
Do you want to continue? {y|n}: y
network port show –fields flowcontrol-admin
Disable Unused FCoE Capability on CNA Ports
If the UTA2 port is set to CNA mode and is only expected to handle Ethernet data traffic (for example NFS), then the unused FCoE capability of the port should be disabled by setting the corresponding FCP adapter to state down with the fcp adapter modify command. Here are some examples:
fcp adapter modify -node <st-node01> -adapter 0e –status-admin down
fcp adapter modify -node <st-node01> -adapter 0f –status-admin down
fcp adapter modify -node <st-node02> -adapter 0e –status-admin down
fcp adapter modify -node <st-node02> -adapter 0f –status-admin down
fcp adapter show –fields status-admin
Configure Network Time Protocol
To configure time synchronization on the cluster, complete the following steps:
1. Set the time zone for the cluster.
timezone <timezone>
For example, in the eastern United States, the time zone is America/New_York.
2. Set the date for the cluster.
date <ccyymmddhhmm.ss>
The format for the date is <[Century][Year][Month][Day][Hour][Minute].[Second]> (for example, 201703231549.30).
3. Configure the Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers for the cluster.
cluster time-service ntp server create -server <switch-a-ntp-ip>
cluster time-service ntp server create -server <switch-b-ntp-ip>
Configure Simple Network Management Protocol
To configure the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), complete the following steps:
1. Configure basic SNMP information, such as the location and contact. When polled, this information is visible as the sysLocation and sysContact variables in SNMP.
snmp contact <snmp-contact>
snmp location “<snmp-location>”
snmp init 1
options snmp.enable on
2. Configure SNMP traps to send to remote hosts, such as a DFM server or another fault management system.
snmp traphost add <oncommand-um-server-fqdn>
Configure SNMPv1 Access
To configure SNMPv1 access, set the shared, secret plain-text password (called a community):
snmp community add ro <snmp-community>
Configure AutoSupport
NetApp AutoSupport® sends support summary information to NetApp through HTTPS. To configure AutoSupport, run the following command:
system node autosupport modify -node * -state enable –mail-hosts <mailhost> -transport https -support enable -noteto <storage-admin-email>
Enable Cisco Discovery Protocol
To enable the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) on the NetApp storage controllers, run the following command to enable CDP on ONTAP:
node run -node * options cdpd.enable on
To be effective, CDP must also be enabled on directly connected networking equipment such as switches and routers.
Create Jumbo Frame MTU Broadcast Domains in ONTAP
To create a data broadcast domain with an MTU of 9000, run the following commands to create a broadcast domain for NFS on ONTAP:
broadcast-domain create -broadcast-domain Infra_NFS -mtu 9000
Create Interface Groups
To create the LACP interface groups for the 10GbE data interfaces, run the following commands:
ifgrp create -node <st-node01> -ifgrp a0a -distr-func port -mode multimode_lacp
ifgrp add-port -node <st-node01> -ifgrp a0a -port e2a
ifgrp add-port -node <st-node01> -ifgrp a0a -port e2e
ifgrp create -node <st-node02> -ifgrp a0a -distr-func port -mode multimode_lacp
ifgrp add-port -node <st-node02> -ifgrp a0a -port e2a
ifgrp add-port -node <st-node02> -ifgrp a0a -port e2e
ifgrp show
Create VLANs
To create VLANs, create NFS VLAN ports and add them to the NFS broadcast domain:
network port modify –node <st-node01> -port a0a –mtu 9000
network port modify –node <st-node02> -port a0a –mtu 9000
network port vlan create –node <st-node01> -vlan-name a0a-<infra-nfs-vlan-id>
network port vlan create –node <st-node02> -vlan-name a0a-<infra-nfs-vlan-id>
broadcast-domain add-ports -broadcast-domain Infra_NFS -ports <st-node01>:a0a-<infra-nfs-vlan-id>, <st-node02>:a0a-<infra-nfs-vlan-id>
Create Storage Virtual Machine
To create an infrastructure SVM, complete the following steps:
1. Run the vserver create command.
vserver create –vserver Infra-SVM –rootvolume rootvol –aggregate aggr1_node01 –rootvolume-security-style unix
2. Remove the unused data protocols from the SVM - CIFS, iSCSI, and NDMP.
vserver remove-protocols –vserver Infra-SVM -protocols iscsi,cifs,ndmp
3. Add the two data aggregates to the Infra-SVM aggregate list for the NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC).
vserver modify –vserver Infra-SVM –aggr-list aggr1_node01,aggr1_node02
4. Enable and run the NFS protocol in the Infra-SVM.
nfs create -vserver Infra-SVM -udp disabled
If NFS license is not installed during the cluster configuration, make sure install the license for staring the NFS service.
5. Turn on the SVM vstorage parameter for the NetApp NFS VAAI plug-in.
vserver nfs modify –vserver Infra-SVM –vstorage enabled
vserver nfs show
Create Load-Sharing Mirrors of SVM Root Volume
To create a load-sharing mirror of an SVM root volume, complete the following steps:
1. Create a volume to be the load-sharing mirror of the infrastructure SVM root volume on each node.
volume create –vserver Infra-SVM –volume rootvol_m01 –aggregate aggr1_node01 –size 1GB –type DP
volume create –vserver Infra-SVM –volume rootvol_m02 –aggregate aggr1_node02 –size 1GB –type DP
2. Create a job schedule to update the root volume mirror relationships every 15 minutes.
job schedule interval create -name 15min -minutes 15
3. Create the mirroring relationships.
snapmirror create –source-path Infra-SVM:rootvol –destination-path Infra-SVM:rootvol_m01 –type LS -schedule 15min
snapmirror create –source-path Infra-SVM:rootvol –destination-path Infra-SVM:rootvol_m02 –type LS -schedule 15min
4. Initialize the mirroring relationship.
snapmirror initialize-ls-set –source-path Infra-SVM:rootvol
snapmirror show
Create Block Protocol (FC) Service
Run the following command to create the FCP service on each SVM. This command also starts the FCP service and sets the WWN for the SVM.
fcp create -vserver Infra-SVM
fcp show
If FC license is not installed during the cluster configuration, make sure install the license for creating FC service
Configure HTTPS Access
To configure secure access to the storage controller, complete the following steps:
1. Increase the privilege level to access the certificate commands.
set -privilege diag
Do you want to continue? {y|n}: y
2. Generally, a self-signed certificate is already in place. Verify the certificate and obtain parameters (for example, <serial-number>) by running the following command:
security certificate show
For each SVM shown, the certificate common name should match the DNS FQDN of the SVM. Delete the two default certificates and replace them with either self-signed certificates or certificates from a certificate authority (CA). To delete the default certificates, run the following commands:
security certificate delete -vserver Infra-SVM -common-name Infra-SVM -ca Infra-SVM -type server -serial <serial-number>
Deleting expired certificates before creating new certificates is a best practice. Run the security certificate delete command to delete the expired certificates. In the following command, use TAB completion to select and delete each default certificate.
3. To generate and install self-signed certificates, run the following commands as one-time commands. Generate a server certificate for the Infra-SVM and the cluster SVM. Use TAB completion to aid in the completion of these commands.
security certificate create -common-name <cert-common-name> -type server -size 2048 -country <cert-country> -state <cert-state> -locality <cert-locality> -organization <cert-org> -unit <cert-unit> -email-addr <cert-email> -expire-days <cert-days> -protocol SSL -hash-function SHA256 -vserver Infra-SVM
4. To obtain the values for the parameters required in step 5 (<cert-ca> and <cert-serial>), run the security certificate show command.
5. Enable each certificate that was just created by using the –server-enabled true and –client-enabled false parameters. Use TAB completion to aid in the completion of these commands.
security ssl modify -vserver <clustername> -server-enabled true -client-enabled false -ca <cert-ca> -serial <cert-serial> -common-name <cert-common-name>
6. Disable HTTP cluster management access.
system services firewall policy delete -policy mgmt -service http –vserver <clustername>
It is normal for some of these commands to return an error message stating that the entry does not exist.
7. Change back to the normal admin privilege level and set up the system to allow SVM logs to be available by web.
set –privilege admin
vserver services web modify –name spi|ontapi|compat –vserver * -enabled true
Configure NFSv3
To configure NFSv3 on the SVM, complete the following steps:
1. Create a new rule for the infrastructure NFS subnet in the default export policy.
vserver export-policy rule create –vserver Infra-SVM -policyname default –ruleindex 1 –protocol nfs -clientmatch <infra-nfs-subnet-cidr> -rorule sys –rwrule sys -superuser sys –allow-suid false
2. Assign the FlexPod export policy to the infrastructure SVM root volume.
volume modify –vserver Infra-SVM –volume rootvol –policy default
Create FlexVol Volumes
The following information is required to create a NetApp FlexVol® volume:
· The volume name
· The volume size
· The aggregate on which the volume exists
FlexVol volumes are created to house boot LUNs for ESXi servers, datastore LUNs for virtual desktops and RDS hosts, and for CIFS shares hosting user profile data. For specific details about the volumes created during this validation, see the Storage Configuration section below.
To create FlexVol volumes, run the following commands:
volume create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume infra_ds01 -aggregate aggr1_AFF300_01 -size 6TB -state online -policy default -space-guarantee none -percent-snapshot-space 0
volume create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume rdsh_1 -aggregate aggr1_AFF300_02 -size 6TB -state online -policy default -space-guarantee none -percent-snapshot-space 0
volume create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume esxi_boot -aggregate aggr1_AFF300_01 -size 500GB -state online -policy default -space-guarantee none -percent-snapshot-space 0
volume create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_01 -aggregate aggr1_AFF300_01 -size 11TB -state online -policy default -space-guarantee none -percent-snapshot-space 0
volume create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_02 -aggregate aggr1_AFF300_02 -size 11TB -state online -policy default -space-guarantee none -percent-snapshot-space 0
volume create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_03 -aggregate aggr1_AFF300_01 -size 11TB -state online -policy default -space-guarantee none -percent-snapshot-space 0
volume create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_04 -aggregate aggr1_AFF300_02 -size 11TB -state online -policy default -space-guarantee none -percent-snapshot-space 0
volume create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_05 -aggregate aggr1_AFF300_01 -size 11TB -state online -policy default -space-guarantee none -percent-snapshot-space 0
volume create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_06 -aggregate aggr1_AFF300_02 -size 11TB -state online -policy default -space-guarantee none -percent-snapshot-space 0
snapmirror update-ls-set -source-path Infra-SVM:rootvol
Create Boot LUNs
Boot LUNs are created for each ESXi host, and data LUNs are created to host virtual desktop and RDS host VMs. For specific details about the LUNs created during this validation, see the Storage Configuration section below. To create boot and data LUNs, run the following commands:
lun create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume esxi_boot -lun VM-Host-Infra-01 -size 10GB -ostype vmware -space-reserve disabled
lun create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume esxi_boot -lun VM-Host-Infra-02 -size 10GB -ostype vmware -space-reserve disabled
lun create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume esxi_boot -lun VDI-1 -size 10GB -ostype vmware -space-reserve disabled
lun create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume esxi_boot -lun VDI-2 -size 10GB -ostype vmware -space-reserve disabled
…
lun create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_01 -lun vdi_fc_01 -size 10TB -ostype vmware -space-reserve disabled
lun create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_02 -lun vdi_fc_02 -size 10TB -ostype vmware -space-reserve disabled
lun create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_03 -lun vdi_fc_03 -size 10TB -ostype vmware -space-reserve disabled
lun create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_04 -lun vdi_fc_04 -size 10TB -ostype vmware -space-reserve disabled
lun create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_05 -lun vdi_fc_05 -size 10TB -ostype vmware -space-reserve disabled
lun create -vserver Infra-SVM -volume vdi_fc_06 -lun vdi_fc_06 -size 10TB -ostype vmware -space-reserve disabled
Create igroups
Igroups are created to map host initiators to the LUNs they are allowed to access. Igroups can be FCP protocol, iSCSI protocol, or both. An igroup is created for each ESXi host to map for access to a boot LUN. A separate igroup is created for the entire ESXi cluster to map all data LUNs to every node in the cluster.
To create igroups, run the following commands:
igroup create –vserver Infra-SVM –igroup VM-Host-Infra-01 –protocol fcp –ostype vmware –initiator <vm-host-infra-01-iqn-a>,<vm-host-infra-01-iqn-b>
igroup create –vserver Infra-SVM –igroup VM-Host-Infra-02 –protocol fcp –ostype vmware –initiator <vm-host-infra-02-iqn-a>,<vm-host-infra-02-iqn-b>
igroup create –vserver Infra-SVM –igroup VDI-1 –protocol fcp –ostype vmware –initiator <vm-host-VDI-1-iqn-a>,<vm-host-VDI-1-iqn-b>
igroup create –vserver Infra-SVM –igroup VDI-2 –protocol fcp –ostype vmware –initiator <vm-host-VDI-2-iqn-a>,<vm-host-VDI-2-iqn-b>
igroup create –vserver Infra-SVM –igroup VDI-3 –protocol fcp –ostype vmware –initiator <vm-host-VDI-3-iqn-a>,<vm-host-VDI-3-iqn-b>
…
igroup create –vserver Infra-SVM –igroup VDI-Cluster –protocol fcp –ostype vmware –initiator <vm-host-VDI-1-iqn-a>,<vm-host-VDI-1-iqn-b>,<vm-host-VDI-2-iqn-a>,<vm-host-VDI-2-iqn-b>,<vm-host-VDI-3-iqn-a>,<vm-host-VDI-3-iqn-b>,<…>
To view igroups, type igroup show.
Map Boot LUNs to igroups
To allow access to specific LUNs by specific hosts, map the LUN to the appropriate igroup. For specific details about the LUNs created during this validation, see the Storage Configuration section below. To map luns to igroups, run the following commands:
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume esxi_boot –lun VM-Host-Infra-01 –igroup VM-Host-Infra-01 –lun-id 0
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume esxi_boot –lun VM-Host-Infra-02 –igroup VM-Host-Infra-02 –lun-id 0
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume esxi_boot –lun VDI-1 –igroup VDI-1 –lun-id 0
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume esxi_boot –lun VDI-2 –igroup VDI-2 –lun-id 0
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume esxi_boot –lun VDI-3 –igroup VDI-3 –lun-id 0
…
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume infra_ds01 –lun infra_ds01 –igroup VDI-Cluster –lun-id 1
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume rdsh_1 –lun rdsh_1 –igroup VDI-Cluster –lun-id 2
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume vdi_fc_01 –lun vdi_fc_01 –igroup VDI-Cluster –lun-id 3
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume vdi_fc_02 –lun vdi_fc_02 –igroup VDI-Cluster –lun-id 4
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume vdi_fc_03 –lun vdi_fc_03 –igroup VDI-Cluster –lun-id 5
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume vdi_fc_04 –lun vdi_fc_04 –igroup VDI-Cluster –lun-id 6
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume vdi_fc_05 –lun vdi_fc_05 –igroup VDI-Cluster –lun-id 7
lun map –vserver Infra-SVM –volume vdi_fc_06 –lun vdi_fc_06 –igroup VDI-Cluster –lun-id 8
Schedule Deduplication
On NetApp All Flash FAS systems, deduplication is enabled by default. To schedule deduplication, complete the following step:
1. After the volumes are created, assign a once-a-day deduplication schedule to esxi_boot, infra_datastore_1 and infra_datastore_2:
efficiency modify –vserver Infra-SVM –volume esxi_boot –schedule sun-sat@0
efficiency modify –vserver Infra-SVM –volume infra_datastore_1 –schedule sun-sat@0
efficiency modify –vserver Infra-SVM –volume infra_datastore_2 –schedule sun-sat@0
Create FC LIFs
Run the following commands to create four FC LIFs (two on each node):
network interface create -vserver Infra-SVM -lif fcp_lif01a -role data -data-protocol fcp -home-node <st-node01> -home-port 0g –status-admin up
network interface create -vserver Infra-SVM -lif fcp_lif01b -role data -data-protocol fcp -home-node <st-node01> -home-port 0h –status-admin up
network interface create -vserver Infra-SVM -lif fcp_lif02a -role data -data-protocol fcp -home-node <st-node02> -home-port 0g –status-admin up
network interface create -vserver Infra-SVM -lif fcp_lif02b -role data -data-protocol fcp -home-node <st-node02> -home-port 0h –status-admin up
network interface show
Create NFS LIF
To create an NFS LIF, run the following commands:
network interface create -vserver Infra-SVM -lif nfs_lif01 -role data -data-protocol nfs -home-node <st-node01> -home-port a0a-<infra-nfs-vlan-id> –address <node01-nfs_lif01-ip> -netmask <node01-nfs_lif01-mask> -status-admin up –failover-policy broadcast-domain-wide –firewall-policy data –auto-revert true
network interface create -vserver Infra-SVM -lif nfs_lif02 -role data -data-protocol nfs -home-node <st-node02> -home-port a0a-<infra-nfs-vlan-id> –address <node02-nfs_lif02-ip> -netmask <node02-nfs_lif02-mask>> -status-admin up –failover-policy broadcast-domain-wide –firewall-policy data –auto-revert true
network interface show
Add Infrastructure SVM Administrator
To add the infrastructure SVM administrator and SVM administration LIF in the out-of-band management network, complete the following steps:
1. Run the following commands:
network interface create –vserver Infra-SVM –lif svm-mgmt –role data –data-protocol none –home-node <st-node02> -home-port e0c –address <svm-mgmt-ip> -netmask <svm-mgmt-mask> -status-admin up –failover-policy broadcast-domain-wide –firewall-policy mgmt –auto-revert true
The SVM management IP in this step should be in the same subnet as the storage cluster management IP.
2. Create a default route to allow the SVM management interface to reach the outside world.
network route create –vserver Infra-SVM -destination 0.0.0.0/0 –gateway <svm-mgmt-gateway>
network route show
3. Set a password for the SVM vsadmin user and unlock the user.
security login password –username vsadmin –vserver Infra-SVM
Enter a new password: <password>
Enter it again: <password>
security login unlock –username vsadmin –vserver Infra-SVM
A cluster serves data through at least one and possibly several SVMs. We have just gone through creating a single SVM. If you would like to configure your environment with multiple SVMs, this is a good time to create additional SVMs.
NetApp A300 Storage Configuration
The storage components for this reference architecture are composed of one AFF A300 HA pair and one DS224C disk with 24x 3.8TB solid-state drives. This configuration delivers 65 TB of usable storage and over 200TB effective storage with deduplication, compression and compaction, and the potential for over 300,000 IOPs depending on the application workload.
This section contains details on the specific storage system configuration used in this validation. This section does not include all possible configuration options, only those necessary to support this solution.
Cluster Details
A cluster consists of one or more nodes grouped as (HA pairs) to form a scalable cluster. Creating a cluster enables the nodes to pool their resources and distribute work across the cluster, while presenting administrators with a single entity to manage. Clustering also enables continuous service to end users if individual nodes go offline.
Table 20 lists the cluster details.
| Cluster Name |
ONTAP Version |
Node Count |
Data SVM Count |
Cluster Raw Capacity |
| AFF A300 |
9.1P5 |
2 |
1 |
83.84TB |
Storage Details
Table 21 lists the storage details for each HA pair.
| Node Names |
Shelf Count |
Disk Count |
Disk Capacity |
Raw Capacity |
| AFF A300-01 AFF A300-02 |
DS224-12: 1 |
SSD: 24 |
SSD: 83.84TB |
83.84TB |
Raw capacity is not the same as usable capacity.
Drive Allocation Details
Table 22 lists the drive allocation details for each node.
Table 22 Drive Allocation Details
| Node Name |
Total Disk Count |
Allocated Disk Count |
Disk Type |
Raw Capacity |
Spare Disk Count |
| AFF A300-01 |
12 |
12 |
3.8TB_SSD |
41.92TB |
0 |
| AFF A300-02 |
12 |
12 |
3.8TB_SSD |
41.92TB |
0 |
Raw capacity is not the same as usable capacity.
Adapter Card Details
Table 23 lists the adapter cards present in each node.
| Node Name |
System Model |
Slot Number |
Part Number |
Description |
| AFF A300-01 |
AFF A300 |
1 |
X2069 |
PMC PM8072; PCI-E quad-port SAS (PM8072) |
| AFF A300-01 |
AFF A300 |
2 |
X1144A |
NIC,2x40GbE,QSFP |
| AFF A300-02 |
AFF A300 |
1 |
X2069 |
PMC PM8072; PCI-E quad-port SAS (PM8072) |
| AFF A300-02 |
AFF A300 |
2 |
X1144A |
NIC,2x40GbE,QSFP |
Firmware Details
Table 24 lists the relevant firmware details for each node.
| Node Name |
Node Firmware |
Shelf Firmware |
Drive Firmware |
Remote Mgmt Firmware |
| AFF A300-01 |
AFF A300: 11.1 |
IOM12: A:0210, B:0210 |
X357_S163A3T8ATE: NA51 |
SP: 5.1 |
| AFF A300-02 |
AFF A300: 11.1 |
IOM12: A:0210, B:0210 |
X357_S163A3T8ATE: NA51 |
SP: 5.0X21 |
Network Port Settings
You can modify the MTU, autonegotiation, duplex, flow control, and speed settings of a physical network port or interface group.
Table 25 lists the network port settings.
Table 25 Network Port Settings for ONTAP
| Node Name |
Port Name |
Link Status |
Port Type |
MTU Size |
Flow Control (Admin/Oper) |
IPspace Name |
Broadcast Domain |
| AFF A300-01 |
a0a |
up |
if_group |
9000 |
full/- |
Default |
|
| AFF A300-01 |
a0a-61 |
up |
vlan |
1500 |
full/- |
Default |
IB |
| AFF A300-01 |
a0a-62 |
up |
vlan |
1500 |
full/- |
Default |
cifs |
| AFF A300-01 |
a0a-63 |
up |
vlan |
9000 |
full/- |
Default |
nfs |
| AFF A300-01 |
e0a |
up |
physical |
9000 |
none/none |
Cluster |
Cluster |
| AFF A300-01 |
e0b |
up |
physical |
9000 |
none/none |
Cluster |
Cluster |
| AFF A300-01 |
e0c |
down |
physical |
1500 |
none/none |
Default |
Default |
| AFF A300-01 |
e0d |
down |
physical |
1500 |
none/none |
Default |
|
| AFF A300-01 |
e0e |
up |
physical |
1500 |
none/none |
Default |
|
| AFF A300-01 |
e0f |
up |
physical |
1500 |
none/none |
Default |
|
| AFF A300-01 |
e0M |
up |
physical |
1500 |
full/full |
Default |
Default |
| AFF A300-01 |
e2a |
up |
physical |
9000 |
none/none |
Default |
|
| AFF A300-01 |
e2e |
up |
physical |
9000 |
none/none |
Default |
|
| AFF A300-02 |
a0a |
up |
if_group |
9000 |
full/- |
Default |
|
| AFF A300-02 |
a0a-61 |
up |
vlan |
1500 |
full/- |
Default |
IB |
| AFF A300-02 |
a0a-62 |
up |
vlan |
1500 |
full/- |
Default |
cifs |
| AFF A300-02 |
a0a-63 |
up |
vlan |
9000 |
full/- |
Default |
nfs |
| AFF A300-02 |
e0a |
up |
physical |
9000 |
none/none |
Cluster |
Cluster |
| AFF A300-02 |
e0b |
up |
physical |
9000 |
none/none |
Cluster |
Cluster |
| AFF A300-02 |
e0c |
down |
physical |
1500 |
none/none |
Default |
Default |
| AFF A300-02 |
e0d |
down |
physical |
1500 |
none/none |
Default |
|
| AFF A300-02 |
e0e |
up |
physical |
1500 |
none/none |
Default |
|
| AFF A300-02 |
e0f |
up |
physical |
1500 |
none/none |
Default |
|
| AFF A300-02 |
e0M |
up |
physical |
1500 |
full/full |
Default |
Default |
| AFF A300-02 |
e2a |
up |
physical |
9000 |
none/none |
Default |
|
| AFF A300-02 |
e2e |
up |
physical |
9000 |
none/none |
Default |
|
Network Port Interface Group Settings
An interface group (ifgrp) is a port aggregate containing two or more physical ports that acts as a single trunk port. Expanded capabilities include increased resiliency, increased availability, and load distribution. You can create three different types of interface groups on your storage system: single-mode, static multimode, and dynamic multimode. Each interface group provides different levels of fault tolerance. Multimode interface groups provide methods for load balancing network traffic.
Table 26 lists the network port ifgrp settings.
Table 26 Network Port Ifgrp Settings
| Node Name |
Ifgrp Name |
Mode |
Distribution Function |
Ports |
| AFF A300-01 |
a0a |
multimode_lacp |
port |
e2a, e2e |
| AFF A300-02 |
a0a |
multimode_lacp |
port |
e2a, e2e |
Network Routes
You control how LIFs in an SVM use your network for outbound traffic by configuring routing tables and static routes.
· Routing tables. Routes are configured for each SVM and identify the SVM, subnet, and destination. Because routing tables are for each SVM, routing changes to one SVM do not alter the route table of another SVM.
Routes are created in an SVM when a service or application is configured for the SVM. Like data SVMs, the admin SVM of each IPspace has its own routing table because LIFs can be owned by admin SVMs and might need route configurations different from those on data SVMs.
If you have defined a default gateway when creating a subnet, a default route to that gateway is added automatically to the SVM that uses a LIF from that subnet.
· Static route. A defined route between a LIF and a specific destination IP address. The route can use a gateway IP address.
Table 27 lists the network routes for Data ONTAP 8.3 or later.
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Destination Address |
Gateway Address |
Metric |
LIF Names |
| AFF A300 |
AFF A300 |
0.0.0.0/0 |
10.29.164.1 |
20 |
AFF-A300-01_mgmt1 AFF-A300-02_mgmt1 cluster_mgmt |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
0.0.0.0/0 |
10.10.62.1 |
20 |
CIFS1-01 CIFS2-02 |
Network Port Broadcast Domains
Broadcast domains enable you to group network ports that belong to the same layer 2 network. The ports in the group can then be used by an SVM for data or management traffic. A broadcast domain resides in an IPspace.
During cluster initialization, the system creates two default broadcast domains:
· The default broadcast domain contains ports that are in the default IPspace. These ports are used primarily to serve data. Cluster management and node management ports are also in this broadcast domain.
· The cluster broadcast domain contains ports that are in the cluster IPspace. These ports are used for cluster communication and include all cluster ports from all nodes in the cluster.
Table 28 lists the network port broadcast domains for Data ONTAP 8.3 or later.
Table 28 Network Port Broadcast Domains
| Cluster Name |
Broadcast Domain |
IPspace Name |
MTU Size |
Subnet Names |
Port List |
Failover Group Names |
| AFF A300 |
Cifs |
Default |
1500 |
|
AFF-A300-01:a0a-62 AFF-A300-02:a0a-62 |
cifs |
| AFF A300 |
Cluster |
Cluster |
9000 |
|
AFF-A300-01:e0a AFF-A300-01:e0b AFF-A300-02:e0a AFF-A300-02:e0b |
Cluster |
| AFF A300 |
Default |
Default |
1500 |
|
AFF-A300-01:e0c AFF-A300-01:e0M AFF-A300-02:e0c AFF-A300-02:e0M |
Default |
| AFF A300 |
IB |
Default |
1500 |
|
AFF-A300-01:a0a-61 AFF-A300-02:a0a-61 |
IB |
| AFF A300 |
nfs |
Default |
9000 |
|
AFF-A300-01:a0a-63 AFF-A300-02:a0a-63 |
nfs |
Aggregate Configuration
Aggregates are containers for the disks managed by a node. You can use aggregates to isolate workloads with different performance demands, to tier data with different access patterns, or to segregate data for regulatory purposes.
· For business-critical applications that need the lowest possible latency and the highest possible performance, you might create an aggregate consisting entirely of SSDs.
· To tier data with different access patterns, you can create a hybrid aggregate, deploying flash as high-performance cache for a working data set, while using lower-cost HDDs or object storage for less frequently accessed data. A Flash Pool consists of both SSDs and HDDs. A Fabric Pool consists of an all-SSD aggregate with an attached object store.
· If you need to segregate archived data from active data for regulatory purposes, you can use an aggregate consisting of capacity HDDs, or a combination of performance and capacity HDDs.
Table 29 contains all aggregate configuration information.
Table 29 Aggregate Configuration
| Aggregate Name |
Home Node Name |
State |
RAID Status |
RAID Type |
Disk Count (By Type) |
RG Size (HDD / SSD) |
HA Policy |
Has Mroot |
Mirrored |
Size Nominal |
| aggr0_A300_01 |
AFF-A300-01 |
online |
normal |
raid_dp |
11@3.8TB_SSD (Shared) |
24 |
cfo |
True |
False |
414.47GB |
| aggr0_A300_02 |
AFF-A300-02 |
online |
normal |
raid_dp |
10@3.8TB_SSD (Shared) |
24 |
cfo |
True |
False |
368.42GB |
| aggr1_AFF300_01 |
AFF-A300-01 |
online |
normal |
raid_dp |
23@3.8TB_SSD (Shared) |
24 |
sfo |
False |
False |
32.51TB |
| aggr1_AFF300_02 |
AFF-A300-02 |
online |
normal |
raid_dp |
23@3.8TB_SSD (Shared) |
24 |
sfo |
False |
False |
32.51TB |
Storage Virtual Machines
An SVM is a secure virtual storage server that contains data volumes and one or more LIFs through which it serves data to the clients. An SVM appears as a single dedicated server to the clients. Each SVM has a separate administrator authentication domain and can be managed independently by its SVM administrator.
In a cluster, an SVM facilitates data access. A cluster must have at least one SVM to serve data. SVMs use the storage and network resources of the cluster. However, the volumes and LIFs are exclusive to the SVM. Multiple SVMs can coexist in a single cluster without being bound to any node in a cluster. However, they are bound to the physical cluster on which they exist.
SVM Configuration
Table 30 lists the SVM configuration.
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Type |
Subtype |
State |
Allowed Protocols |
Name Server Switch |
Name Mapping Switch |
Comment |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
data |
default |
running |
running |
cifs, fcp |
AFF A300 |
|
SVM Storage Configuration
Table 31 lists the SVM storage configuration.
Table 31 SVM Storage Configuration
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Root Volume Security Style |
Language |
Root Volume |
Root Aggregate |
Aggregate List |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
unix |
c.utf_8 |
svm_root |
aggr1_AFF300_01 |
aggr1_AFF300_01, aggr1_AFF300_02 |
Volume Configuration
A FlexVol volume is a data container associated with a SVM with FlexVol volumes. It gets its storage from a single associated aggregate, which it might share with other FlexVol volumes or infinite volumes. It can be used to contain files in a NAS environment, or LUNs in a SAN environment.
Table 32 the FlexVol configuration.
Table 32 FlexVol Configuration
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Volume Name |
Containing Aggregate |
Type |
Snapshot Policy |
Export Policy |
Security Style |
Size Nominal |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
esxi_boot |
aggr1_AFF300_01 |
RW |
default |
default |
unix |
500.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
home |
aggr1_AFF300_02 |
RW |
default |
default |
ntfs |
1.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
infra_ds01 |
aggr1_AFF300_02 |
RW |
default |
default |
unix |
6.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
rdsh_1 |
aggr1_AFF300_01 |
RW |
default |
default |
unix |
6.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_ds01 |
aggr1_AFF300_02 |
RW |
default |
default |
unix |
6.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds01 |
aggr1_AFF300_01 |
RW |
default |
default |
unix |
11.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds02 |
aggr1_AFF300_01 |
RW |
default |
default |
unix |
11.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds03 |
aggr1_AFF300_01 |
RW |
default |
default |
unix |
11.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds04 |
aggr1_AFF300_02 |
RW |
default |
default |
unix |
11.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds05 |
aggr1_AFF300_02 |
RW |
default |
default |
unix |
11.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds06 |
aggr1_AFF300_02 |
RW |
default |
default |
unix |
11.00TB |
Protocol Configuration
NAS
ONTAP can be accessed over Common Internet File System (CIFS), Server Message Block (SMB) and Network File System (NFS) capable clients.
This means clients can access all files on a SVM regardless of the protocol they are connecting with or the type of authentication they require.
Logical Interfaces
A LIF is an IP address with associated characteristics, such as a role, a home port, a home node, a routing group, a list of ports to fail over to, and a firewall policy. You can configure LIFs on ports over which the cluster sends and receives communications over the network.
LIFs can be hosted on the following ports:
· Physical ports that are not part of interface groups
· Interface groups
· VLANs
· Physical ports or interface groups that host VLANs
While configuring SAN protocols such as FC on a LIF, it a LIF role determines the kind of traffic that is supported over the LIF, along with the failover rules that apply and the firewall restrictions that are in place.
LIF failover refers to the automatic migration of a LIF in response to a link failure on the LIF's current network port. When such a port failure is detected, the LIF is migrated to a working port.
A failover group contains a set of network ports (physical, VLANs, and interface groups) on one or more nodes. A LIF can subscribe to a failover group. The network ports that are present in the failover group define the failover targets for the LIF.
NAS Logical Interface Settings
Table 33 lists the NAS LIF settings.
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Interface Name |
Status (Admin/Oper) |
IP Address |
Current Node |
Current Port |
Is Home |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
CIFS1-01 |
up/up |
10.10.62.10/24 |
AFF-A300-02 |
a0a-62 |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
CIFS2-02 |
up/up |
10.10.62.11/24 |
AFF-A300-02 |
a0a-62 |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
mgmt2 |
up/up |
10.10.61.26/24 |
AFF-A300-01 |
a0a-61 |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
NFS1-01 |
up/up |
10.10.63.10/24 |
AFF-A300-02 |
a0a-63 |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
NFS2-02 |
up/up |
10.10.63.11/24 |
AFF-A300-02 |
a0a-63 |
True |
Windows File Services
You can enable and configure a CIFS SVM to let SMB clients access files on your SVM. Each data SVM in the cluster can be bound to only one Active Directory domain; however, the data SVMs do not need to be bound to the same domain. Each SVM can be bound to a unique Active Directory domain. Additionally, a CIFS SVM can be used to tunnel cluster administration authentication, which can be bound to only one Active Directory domain.
CIFS Servers
CIFS clients can access files on a SVM using the CIFS protocol provided ONTAP can properly authenticate the user.
Table 34 lists CIFS server configuration information.
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
CIFS Server |
Domain |
Domain NetBIOS Name |
WINS Servers |
Preferred DC |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
INFRA |
VDILAB.LOCAL |
VDILAB |
|
|
CIFS Options
Most of these options are only available starting with Data ONTAP 8.2.
Table 35 lists CIFS options.
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
SMB v2 Enabled |
SMB v3 Enabled |
Export Policy Enabled |
Copy Offload Enabled |
Local Users and Groups Enabled |
Referral Enabled |
Shadow Copy Enabled |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
True |
True |
False |
True |
True |
False |
True |
CIFS Local Users and Groups
You can create local users and groups on the SVM. The CIFS server can use local users for CIFS authentication and can use both local users and groups for authorization when determining both share and file and directory access rights.
Local group members can be local users, domain users and groups, and domain machine accounts.
Local users and groups can also be assigned privileges. Privileges control access to SVM resources and can override the permissions that are set on objects. A user or member of a group that is assigned a privilege is granted the specific rights that the privilege allows.
Privileges do not provide ONTAP general administrative capabilities.
CIFS Shares
A CIFS share is a named access point in a volume and/or namespace that enables CIFS clients to view, browse, and manipulate files on an SVM.
Table 36 lists the CIFS shares.
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Share Name |
Path |
Share Properties |
Symlink Properties |
Share ACL |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
%w |
%w |
homedirectory |
symlinks |
Everyone:Full Control |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
admin$ |
/ |
browsable |
|
UTD |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
c$ |
/ |
oplocks browsable changenotify show_previous_versions |
symlinks |
Administrators:Full Control |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
home |
/home |
oplocks browsable changenotify show_previous_versions |
symlinks |
Everyone:Full Control |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
ipc$ |
/ |
browsable |
|
UTD |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
Profile$ |
/home/Profile |
oplocks browsable changenotify show_previous_versions |
symlinks |
Everyone:Full Control |
CIFS Home Directory Search Paths
ONTAP home directories enable you to configure an SMB share that maps to different directories based on the user that connects to it and a set of variables. Instead of having to create separate shares for each user, you can configure a single share with a few home directory parameters to define a user's relationship between an entry point (the share) and their home directory (a directory on the SVM).
The home directory search paths are a set of absolute paths from the root of the SVM that you specify that directs the ONTAP search for home directories. You specify one or more search paths by using the vserver cifs home-directory search-path add command. If you specify multiple search paths, ONTAP tries them in the order specified until it finds a valid path.
Table 37 lists the CIFS home directory search paths.
Table 37 CIFS Home Directory Search Paths
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Position |
Path |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
1 |
/home/LoginVSI |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
2 |
/home/RDSHVSI |
SAN
Storage Area Network (SAN) is a term used to describe a purpose-built storage controller that provides block-based data access. ONTAP supports traditional FC as well as iSCSI and FCoE) within a unified architecture.
LUNs
LUNs are created and exist within a given FlexVol volume and are used to store data which is presented to servers or clients. LUNs provide storage for block-based protocols such as FC or iSCSI.
Table 38 lists the LUN details.
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Path |
Mapped |
Online |
Protocol Type |
Read Only |
Size |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/infra_host_01 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/infra_host_02 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-1 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-2 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-3 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-4 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-5 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-6 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-7 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-9 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-10 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-11 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-12 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-13 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-14 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-15 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-17 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-18 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-19 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-20 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-21 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-22 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-23 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-24 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-25 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00GB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/infra_ds01/infra_ds01 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
5.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/rdsh_1/RDSH_ds01 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
5.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_ds01/vdi_ds01 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
5.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds01/vdi_fc_ds01 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds02/vdi_fc_ds02 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds03/vdi_fc_ds03 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds04/vdi_fc_ds04 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds05/vdi_fc_ds05 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00TB |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds06/vdi_fc_ds06 |
True |
True |
vmware |
False |
10.00TB |
Initiator Groups
Initiator groups (igroups) are tables of FC protocol host WWPNs or iSCSI host node names. You can define igroups and map them to LUNs to control which initiators have access to LUNs.
Typically, you want all of the host’s initiator ports or software initiators to have access to a LUN. If you are using multipathing software or have clustered hosts, each initiator port or software initiator of each clustered host needs redundant paths to the same LUN.
You can create igroups that specify which initiators have access to the LUNs either before or after you create LUNs, but you must create igroups before you can map a LUN to an igroup.
Initiator groups can have multiple initiators, and multiple igroups can have the same initiator. However, you cannot map a LUN to multiple igroups that have the same initiator. An initiator cannot be a member of igroups of differing OS types.
Table 39 lists the igroups that have been created.
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Initiator Group Name |
Protocol |
OS Type |
ALUA |
Initiators Logged In |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
Infra_cluster |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
SP_Infra1 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
SP_Infra2 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI_cluster |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-1 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-2 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-3 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-4 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-5 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-6 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-7 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-9 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-10 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-11 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-12 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-13 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-14 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-15 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-17 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-18 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-19 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-20 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-21 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-22 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-23 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-24 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
VDI-25 |
fcp |
vmware |
True |
full |
FCP Logical Interface Settings
Table 40 lists the FCP LIF settings.
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Interface Name |
Status (Admin/Oper) |
Port Name |
Current Node |
Current Port |
Is Home |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
fcp_01a |
up/up |
20:01:00:a0:98:af:bd:e8 |
AFF-A300-01 |
0g |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
fcp_01b |
up/up |
20:02:00:a0:98:af:bd:e8 |
AFF-A300-01 |
0h |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
fcp_02a |
up/up |
20:03:00:a0:98:af:bd:e8 |
AFF-A300-02 |
0g |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
fcp_02b |
up/up |
20:04:00:a0:98:af:bd:e8 |
AFF-A300-02 |
0h |
True |
FCP / FCoE
FCP Service Configuration
FCP is a licensed service on the storage system that enables you to export LUNs and transfer block data to hosts using the SCSI protocol over an FC fabric.
Table 41 lists the FCP service configuration details.
Table 41 FCP Service Configuration
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Node Name |
Available |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
20:00:00:a0:98:af:bd:e8 |
True |
FCP Adapter Configuration
You can use storage controller onboard FC ports as both initiators and targets. You can also add storage controller FC ports on expansion adapters and use them as initiators or targets, depending on the type of expansion adapter installed.
Table 42 lists the details of the storage controller target ports and the WWPN address of each.
Table 42 FCP Adapter Configuration
| Node Name |
Adapter Name |
State |
Data Link Rate |
Media Type |
Speed |
Port Name |
| AFF-A300-01 |
0e |
offlined by user/system |
0 |
ptp |
auto |
50:0a:09:82:80:13:41:27 |
| AFF-A300-01 |
0f |
offlined by user/system |
0 |
ptp |
auto |
50:0a:09:81:80:13:41:27 |
| AFF-A300-01 |
0g |
online |
8 |
ptp |
auto |
50:0a:09:84:80:13:41:27 |
| AFF-A300-01 |
0h |
online |
8 |
ptp |
auto |
50:0a:09:83:80:13:41:27 |
| AFF-A300-02 |
0e |
offlined by user/system |
0 |
ptp |
auto |
50:0a:09:82:80:d3:67:d3 |
| AFF-A300-02 |
0f |
offlined by user/system |
0 |
ptp |
auto |
50:0a:09:81:80:d3:67:d3 |
| AFF-A300-02 |
0g |
online |
8 |
ptp |
auto |
50:0a:09:84:80:d3:67:d3 |
| AFF-A300-02 |
0h |
online |
8 |
ptp |
auto |
50:0a:09:83:80:d3:67:d3 |
Storage Efficiency and Space Management
ONTAP offers a wide range of storage-efficiency technologies in addition to Snapshot. Key technologies include thin provisioning, deduplication, compression, and FlexClone volumes, files, and LUNs. Like Snapshot, all are built on ONTAP WAFL.
Volume Efficiency
You can run deduplication, data compression, and data compaction together or independently on a FlexVol volume or an infinite volume to achieve optimal space savings. Deduplication eliminates duplicate data blocks and data compression compresses the data blocks to reduce the amount of physical storage that is required. Data compaction stores more data in less space to increase storage efficiency.
Beginning with ONTAP 9.2, all inline storage-efficiency features, such as inline deduplication and inline compression, are enabled by default on AFF volumes.
Table 43 lists the volume efficiency settings.
Table 43 Volume Efficiency Settings
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Volume Name |
Space Guarantee |
Dedupe |
Schedule Or Policy Name |
Compression |
Inline Compression |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
esxi_boot |
none |
True |
sun-sat@1 |
True |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
home |
none |
True |
inline-only |
True |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
infra_ds01 |
none |
True |
inline-only |
True |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
rdsh_1 |
none |
True |
inline-only |
True |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
svm_root |
volume |
|
- |
|
|
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_ds01 |
none |
True |
inline-only |
True |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds01 |
none |
True |
inline-only |
True |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds02 |
none |
True |
inline-only |
True |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds03 |
none |
True |
inline-only |
True |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds04 |
none |
True |
inline-only |
True |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds05 |
none |
True |
inline-only |
True |
True |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
vdi_fc_ds06 |
none |
True |
inline-only |
True |
True |
LUN Efficiency
Thin provisioning enables storage administrators to provision more storage on a LUN than is physically present on the volume. By overprovisioning the volume, storage administrators can increase the capacity utilization of that volume. As the blocks are written to the LUN, ONTAP adds more space to the LUN from available space on the volume.
With thin provisioning, you can present more storage space to the hosts connecting to the SVM than what is actually available on the SVM. Storage provisioning with thinly provisioned LUNs enables storage administrators to provide actual storage that the LUN needs. As ONTAP writes blocks to the LUN, the LUN increases in size automatically.
Table 44 lists the LUN efficiency settings.
Table 44 LUN Efficiency Settings
| Cluster Name |
SVM Name |
Path |
Space Reservation Enabled |
Space Allocation Enabled |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/infra_host_01 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/infra_host_02 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-1 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-2 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-3 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-4 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-5 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-6 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-7 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-9 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-10 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-11 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-12 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-13 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-14 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-15 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-17 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-18 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-19 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-20 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-21 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-22 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-23 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-24 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/esxi_boot/VDI-25 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/infra_ds01/infra_ds01 |
True |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/rdsh_1/rdsh_1 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_ds01/vdi_ds01 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds01/vdi_fc_ds01 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds02/vdi_fc_ds02 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds03/vdi_fc_ds03 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds04/vdi_fc_ds04 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds05/vdi_fc_ds05 |
False |
False |
| AFF A300 |
Infra |
/vol/vdi_fc_ds06/vdi_fc_ds06 |
False |
False |
Configure MDS 9100 Series
To configure the MDS 9100 series, complete the following steps:
In this solution, we utilized the Cisco MDS 9148S Switches for Fiber Channel Switching. For racking, cable and initial setup of the MDS switches, please refer to the Quick Start Guide:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/mds9000/hw/9148/quick/guide/MDS_9148_QSG.pdf
1. When the MDS switch is racked and can be logged into, it can now be configured to communicate with the Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects.
2. In this study, we used two separate fabrics each with their own unique VSAN. Fabric A is configured for VSAN400 while Fabric B for VSAN401. In our initial Cisco UCS configuration, you will see where we configured fiber cables on ports 1 and 4 and configured a FC port-channel. FI-A’s FC port channel is configured for VSAN400 and FI-B’s FC port-channel for VSAN401.
Figure 29 VSAN 400 Configured for Fabric A
Figure 30 VSAN 401 Configured for Fabric B
Physically, the Fabric Interconnects extended ports 1 and 2 run to the MDS switch ports 1 and 2.
Figure 31 MDS Switch VSAN Configuration Connectivity
We used a total of 8 16Gb FC links, four connections from each storage controller to each the MDS 9148S SAN Switch for high availability and maximum throughput.
After the ports and port channels are configured, the next steps are to configure the zones and Active Zoneset Database in the MDS switches. The commands listed below detail how to add a single host on both 9148S A and B. You will need to configure all hosts that will access the NetApp array in these commands. The entire MDS 9148S FC switch configuration is included in Appendix A.
MDS-A
Zoneset name AFF-A300_VDI vsan 400
Member {ESXi hostname-fc0}
Exit
Zoneset activate name AFF-A300_VDI vsan 400
Zone commit vsan 400
Exit
Copy running-config startup-config
MDS-B
Zoneset name AFF-A300_VDI vsan 401
Member {ESXi hostname-fc1}
Exit
Zoneset activate name AFF-A300_VDI vsan 401
Zone commit vsan 401
Exit
Copy running-config startup-config
Installing and Configuring VMware ESXi 6.5
This section provides detailed instructions for installing VMware ESXi 6.5 Update1 in an environment. After the procedures are completed, two booted ESXi hosts will be provisioned.
Several methods exist for installing ESXi in a VMware environment. These procedures focus on how to use the built-in keyboard, video, mouse (KVM) console and virtual media features in Cisco UCS Manager to map remote installation media to individual servers and connect to their boot logical unit numbers (LUNs).
Download Cisco Custom Image for ESXi 6.5 Update 1
To download the Cisco Custom Image for ESXi 6.5 Update 1, complete the following steps:
1. Click the following link vmware login page.
2. Type your email or customer number and the password and then click Log in.
3. Click on the following link:
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?productId=614&downloadGroup=ESXI65U1
4. Click Download Now.
5. Save it to your destination folder.
This ESXi 6.5 Cisco custom image includes updates for the fNIC and neNIC drivers. The versions that are part of this image are: neNIC: 1.0.6.0-1; fNIC: 1.6.0.34
KVM Access to Hosts
To log in to the Cisco UCS environment, complete the following steps:
1. Log in to Cisco UCS Manager.
2. The IP KVM enables the administrator to begin the installation of the operating system (OS) through remote media. It is necessary to log in to the Cisco UCS environment to run the IP KVM.
3. Open a Web browser and enter the IP address for the Cisco UCS cluster address. This step launches the Cisco UCS Manager application.
4. Log in to Cisco UCS Manager by using the admin user name and password.
5. From the main menu, click the Servers tab.
6. Select Servers > Service Profiles > root > VM-Host-01.
7. Right-click VM-Host-01 and select KVM Console.
8. Repeat steps for 4-6 for all host servers.
Set Up VMware ESXi Installation
To prepare the server for the OS installation, complete the following steps on each ESXi host:
1. In the KVM window, click the Virtual Media tab.
2. Click Add Image.
3. Browse to the ESXi installer ISO image file and click Open.
4. Select the Mapped checkbox to map the newly added image.
5. Click the KVM tab to monitor the server boot.
6. Boot the server by selecting Boot Server and click OK, then click OK again.
Install ESXi
To install VMware ESXi to the SAN-bootable LUN of the hosts, complete the following steps on each host:
1. On reboot, the machine detects the presence of the ESXi installation media. Select the ESXi installer from the menu that is displayed.
2. After the installer is finished loading, press Enter to continue with the installation.
3. Read and accept the end-user license agreement (EULA). Press F11 to accept and continue.
4. Select the AFF A300 boot LUN.
5. (NetApp LUN C-Mode(naa.600a098038304331395d4) 10 GB that was previously set up as the installation disk for ESXi and press Enter to continue with the installation.
6. Select the appropriate keyboard layout and press Enter.
7. Enter and confirm the root password and press Enter.
8. The installer issues a warning that existing partitions will be removed from the volume. Press F11 to continue with the installation.
9. After the installation is complete, clear the Mapped checkbox (located in the Virtual Media tab of the KVM console) to unmap the ESXi installation image.
The ESXi installation image must be unmapped to make sure that the server reboots into ESXi and not into the installer.
10. The Virtual Media window might issue a warning stating that it is preferable to eject the media from the guest. Because the media cannot be ejected and it is read-only, click Yes to unmap the image.
11. From the KVM tab, press Enter to reboot the server.
Set Up Management Networking for ESXi Hosts
Adding a management network for each VMware host is necessary for managing the host.
To configure the ESXi host with access to the management network, complete the following steps:
1. After the server has finished rebooting, press F2 to customize the system.
2. Log in as root and enter the corresponding password.
3. Select the Configure the Management Network option and press Enter.
4. Select the VLAN (Optional) option and press Enter.
5. Enter the VLAN in-band management ID and press Enter.
6. From the Configure Management Network menu, select IP Configuration and press Enter.
7. Select the Set Static IP Address and Network Configuration option by using the space bar.
8. Enter the IP address for managing the first ESXi host.
9. Enter the subnet mask for the first ESXi host.
10. Enter the default gateway for the first ESXi host.
11. Press Enter to accept the changes to the IP configuration.
12. Select the IPv6 Configuration option and press Enter.
13. Using the spacebar, unselect Enable IPv6 (restart required) and press Enter.
14. Select the DNS Configuration option and press Enter.
Since the IP address is assigned manually, the DNS information must also be entered manually.
15. Enter the IP address of the primary DNS server.
16. Optional: Enter the IP address of the secondary DNS server.
17. Enter the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) for the first ESXi host.
18. Press Enter to accept the changes to the DNS configuration.
19. Press Esc to exit the Configure Management Network submenu.
20. Press Y to confirm the changes and return to the main menu.
21. The ESXi host reboots. After reboot, press F2 and log back in as root.
22. Select Test Management Network to verify that the management network is set up correctly and press Enter.
23. Press Enter to run the test.
24. Press Enter to exit the window.
25. Press Esc to log out of the VMware console.
Download VMware vSphere Client
To download the VMware vSphere Client, complete the following steps:
1. Open a web browser on the management workstation and navigate to the VM-Host-01 management IP address.
2. Download and install the vSphere Client.
This application is downloaded from the VMware website and Internet access is required on the management workstation.
Download VMware vSphere CLI 6.5
To download VMware vSphere CLI 6.5, complete the following steps:
1. Click the following link: https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/6_5
2. Select your OS and click Download.
3. Save it to your destination folder.
4. Run the VMware-vSphere-CLI.exe
5. Click Next.
6. Accept the terms for the license and click Next.
7. Click Next on the Destination Folder screen.
8. Click Install.
9. Click Finish.
Install VMware vSphere CLI 6.5 on the management workstation.
10. Log in to VMware ESXi Hosts by Using VMware vSphere Client.
Log in to VMware ESXi Hosts by using VMware vSphere Client
To log in to the VM-Host-01 ESXi host by using the VMware vSphere Client, complete the following steps:
1. Open the recently downloaded VMware vSphere Client and enter the IP address of VM-Host-01 as the host you are trying to connect to: <<var_vm_host_01_ip>>.
2. Enter root for the user name.
3. Enter the root password.
4. Click Login to connect.
Download Updated Cisco VIC eNIC Drivers
To download the Cisco virtual interface card (VIC) eNIC and fNIC drivers, complete the following steps:
The neNIC version is 1.0.6.0-1 and the fNIC version is 1.6.0.34 were used in this configuration.
1. Open a Web browser on the management workstation and navigate to:
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=ESXI65U1&productId=614&rPId=18152
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?productId=614&downloadGroup=DT-ESXI65-CISCO-NENIC-1060
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESXI65-CISCO-NENIC-1020&productId=614
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESXI60-CISCO-FNIC-16034&productId=491
2. Download the Cisco eNIC and fNIC driver bundle.
3. Open the neNIC driver bundle. This bundle includes the VMware driver bundle which will be uploaded to ESXi hosts.
4. Open the fNIC driver bundle. This bundle includes the VMware driver bundle which will be uploaded to ESXi hosts.
5. Save the location of these driver bundles for uploading to ESXi in the next section.
If the link above has changed, go to www.cisco.com for the latest ISO image of Cisco UCS-related drivers. This ISO will either have the drivers included or may have an HTML file with the location of the latest network drivers.
Load Updated Cisco VIC neNIC and fNIC Drivers
To install VMware VIC Drivers on the ESXi host servers, complete the following steps:
1. From each vSphere Client, select the host in the inventory.
2. Click the Summary tab to view the environment summary.
3. From Resources > Storage, right-click datastore1 and select Browse Datastore.
4. Click the fourth button and select Upload File.
5. Navigate to the saved location for each downloaded VIC driver and select:
a. VMware ESXi 6.5 NIC nenic 1.0.6.0 Driver for Cisco nenic
b. VMware ESXi 6.0 fnic 1.6.0.34 FC Driver for Cisco
6. Click Open on each and click Yes to upload the file to datastore1.
7. Click the fourth button and select Upload File.
8. Make sure the files have been uploaded to both ESXi hosts.
9. From the management workstation, open the VMware vSphere Remote CLI that was previously installed.
10. At the command prompt, run the following commands to account for each host:
To get the host thumbprint, type the command without the –-thumbprint option, then copy and paste the thumbprint into the command.
esxcli –s <<var_vm_host_ip>> -u root –p <<var_password>> --thumbprint <host_thumbprint> software vib update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ESXi6.5_nenic-1.0.6.0-offline_bundle-5894048.zip
esxcli –s <<var_vm_host_ip>> -u root –p <<var_password>> --thumbprint <host_thumbprint> software vib update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/ fnic_driver_1.6.0.34-offline_bundle-5367434.zip
11. Back in the vSphere Client for each host, right click the host and select Reboot.
12. Click Yes and OK to reboot the host.
13. Log back into each host with vSphere Client.
Verify the neNIC driver version installed by entering vmkload_mod –s nenic and vmkload_mod –s fNIC at the command prompt.
Install and Configure VMware vCenter Appliance
Log in to the VM-Host-01 ESXi host by using the VMware vSphere Client and complete the following steps:
1. Open the recently downloaded VMware vSphere Client and enter the IP address of VM-Host-01 as the host you are trying to connect to.
2. Enter root for the user name.
3. Enter the root password.
4. Click Login to connect.
To build the VMWare vCenter VM, complete the following steps:
1. From the vSphere 6 download page on the VMware Web site, download the vCenter ISO file for the vCenter Server appliance onto your system.
2. Mount the vSphere ISO file via Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder vcsa-ui-installer/win32 and click installer file to start the VCSA Appliance from Installer.
A browser will open with an option to Install.
3. Click Install.
Install – Stage 1: Deploy vCenter Server with Embedded Platform Services Controller opens.
4. Follow the onscreen prompts. Accept EULA.
5. Deploy the appliances. Select Embedded Platform Services Controller.
6. Enter the IP of the ESXi host the vCenter Appliance will reside. Click Next. Provide Host IP or FQDN and User Name, Password Credentials of the Host to Connect.
7. Click Yes to accept Certificate Warning.
8. Provide a name for the vCenter appliance, then click Next to continue.
9. Select Install vCenter Server with and Embedded Platform Services Controller (unless your environment already has a PSC).
10. Create a new SSO domain (unless your environment already has and SSO domain. Multiple SSO domains can co-exist).
11. Provide Single Sign On Password and Site Name Credentials.
12. Select the proper appliance size for your deployment. In our study, Large was selected.
13. Select the Data store.
In our study we used the embedded PostgreSQL database.
14. Select Use an embedded database (PostgreSQL).
15. Enter Network Settings for appliance.
It is important to note at this step that you should create a DNS A record for your appliance prior to running the install. The services will fail to startup and your install will fail if it cannot resolve properly.
16. Provide the Necessary Network Gateways and DNS Server Information. Review the install settings and click Finish.
17. When your install completes successfully, you can now login to your Web Client and begin adding hosts and configuring clusters.
18. Configure the Embedded Server Appliance.
Install – Stage 2: Set Up vCenter Server Appliance with an Embedded PSC opens.
19. Sync the time for appliance.
20. Login in to vCenter Appliances Web GUI.
21. Login using IP Address of the Appliance and Download vSphere
22. Log into the vSphere Web Client.
23. Click the link labeled Log in to vSphere Web Client.
24. If prompted, run the VMWare Remote Console Plug-in.
25. Log in using the root user name and password.
26. Click the vCenter link on the left panel.
27. Login vSphere Web GUI.
28. Click the Datacenters link on the left panel.
29. To create a Datacenter, click the icon in the center pane which has the green plus symbol above it.
The screenshot below shows an example of a VDI-DC Data Center.
30. Type VDI-DC as the Datacenter name.
31. Click the vCenter server available in the list. Click OK to continue.
32. Create a Cluster.
33. Right-click Datacenters > VDI-DC in the list in the center pane, then click New Cluster.
34. Name the cluster VDI-CL.
35. Select DRS. Retain the default values.
36. Select vSphere HA. Retain the default values. Configure Cluster Specific Setting.
If mixing Cisco UCS B 200 M5 servers within a vCenter cluster, it is necessary to enable VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) mode. For more information about setting up EVC mode, refer to Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) Processor Support.
37. Click OK to create the new cluster.
38. Click VDI-DC in the left pane.
39. Add a ESXi Host.
40. Right-click Infra in the center pane and click Add Host.
41. Type the host IP address and click Next.
42. Type root as the user name and root password as the password. Click Next to Continue.
43. Click Yes to accept the certificate.
44. Review the host details and click Next to continue.
45. Assign a license and click Next to continue.
46. Click Next to continue.
47. Click Next to continue.
48. Review the configuration parameters then click Finish to add the host.
49. Repeat this for the other hosts and clusters.
50. When completed, the vCenter cluster configuration is comprised of the following clusters, including a cluster to manage the workload launcher hosts:
Building the Virtual Machines and Environment for Workload Testing
Software Infrastructure Configuration
This section details how to configure the software infrastructure components that comprise this solution.
Install and configure the infrastructure virtual machines by following the process provided in the table below:
Table 45 Software Infrastructure Configuration
| Configuration |
Operating System |
Virtual CPU |
Memory |
Disk Size |
Network |
| vCenter Server Appliance |
VCSA- SUSE Linux |
16 |
32 |
640
|
MGMT-VLAN |
| Active Directory Domain Controllers/DHCP/DNS (2) |
Microsoft Windows 2016 |
4 |
12 |
60 |
Infra-VLAN
|
| VMware Horizon Connection Server |
Microsoft Windows 2016 |
4 |
12 |
60 |
Infra-VLAN
|
| VMware Horizon Composer Server-1 |
Microsoft Windows 2016 |
4 |
12 |
40 |
Infra-VLAN
|
| VMware Horizon Replica Server (2) |
Microsoft Windows 2016 |
4 |
8 |
40 |
Infra-VLAN
|
| Microsoft SQL Server 2016 |
Microsoft Windows 2016 |
4 |
12 |
60 |
Infra-VLAN
|
| KMS License Server |
Microsoft Windows 2016 |
4 |
8 |
40 |
Infra-VLAN |
Preparing the Master Image
This section provides guidance around creating the golden (or master) images for the environment. VMs for the master targets must first be installed with the software components needed to build the golden images. For this CVD, the images contain the basics needed to run the Login VSI workload.
The master target for RDSH server roles was configured server 2016 and target master image configured for VDI VMs with Windows 10 64 bit OS as listed in the table below:
Table 46 Master Image Configuration
| Configuration |
Operating System |
Virtual CPU |
Memory |
Disk Size |
Network |
Additional Software |
| RDSH Virtual Machine |
Microsoft Windows Server 2016 |
6 |
24 GB |
40 |
VMXNET3 VDI-VLAN
|
Microsoft Office 2016. Login VSI 4.1.25.6 (Knowledge Worker workload) |
| VDI Virtual Machine (Instant Clone Pool) |
Microsoft Windows 10 64-Bit LTSB Version 1607 |
2 |
2 GB (Reserved) |
32
|
VMXNET3 VDI-DVS (vDS) |
Microsoft Office 2016. Login VSI 4.1.25.6 (Knowledge Worker workload) |
| VDI Virtual Machine(Full Clone Pool) |
Microsoft Windows 10 64-Bit LTSB Version 1607 |
2 |
2 GB (Reserved) |
32
|
VMXNET3 VDI-DVS (vDS) |
Microsoft Office 2016. Login VSI 4.1.25.6 (Knowledge Worker workload) |
Installing and Configuring VMware Horizon Environment
This section details the installation of the VMware core components of the Horizon Connection Server and Replica Servers. This CVD installs 1 VMware Horizon Connection server and 2 VMware Horizon Replica Servers to support both remote desktop server hosted sessions (RDSH), non-persistent virtual desktops (VDI) based on the best practices from VMware. For information about sizing limits, see VMware Horizon View 6 sizing limits and recommendations.
The prerequisites for installing the Horizon Connection server or Composer server is to have Windows 2008/12 to 2016 servers ready. In this study, we have used Windows 2016 server for Horizon Connection Server, Replica Servers, and Composer Server.
VMware Horizon Connection Server Configuration
To configure the VMware Horizon Connection Server, complete the following steps:
1. Download the Horizon Connection server installer from VMware and click Install on the Connection Server Windows Server Image. In this study, we used version Connection Server 7.3.1 build.6760913. For the download, see Download VMware Horizon 7.3.1 Standard.
2. Click the Connection Server installer.
3. Click Next.
4. Accept the terms in the License Agreement.
5. Click Next.
6. Select the Standard Server.
To install additional VMware Horizon Replica servers, during the installation, select Horizon 7 Connection Server Option to sync the Replica Servers with the existing Standard server by providing Horizon Connection Server’s FQDN or IP address.
7. Configure the Windows firewall automatically.
8. Click Install.
9. Click Finish to complete the Horizon Connection Server installation.
Horizon VMware Replica Server Creation
To install Horizon Replica Server and additional Replica servers, complete the following steps:
1. Follow the steps shown in section VMware Horizon Connection Server Configuration. During the Horizon Replica Server installation, select the Replica Server option in order to configure this server as a Replica Server (shown below) and complete all other steps shown above.
2. Click Next and follow the steps (shown for Horizon Standard server) to complete installing additional Horizon Replica Servers.
Install VMware Horizon Composer Server
To install the VMware Horizon Composer Server, complete the following steps:
1. Download the Composer installer from VMware and click Install on the Composer Windows server Image. In this study, we used Composer 7.3.1 build.6744335.
2. Click the Install Horizon Composer installer and click Next.
3. Accept the License Agreement and click Next.
4. Click Install.
5. Provide ODBC database connection details and click Next.
The VMware Horizon 7 Composer is being installed.
6. Click Finish.
Create the Golden Image for VMware Horizon RDS Deployment
You need to create the Golden Image as a prerequisite to install and configure server 2016. To create the Golden Image, complete the following steps:
We used Microsoft 2016 Standard Edition to configure the RDS Server Roles for RDSH VMs to be deployed from the Master image.
1. Login to Windows 2016 RDS Server base VM (Master Image) and click Server Properties and then click Add Roles and Features.
2. Select Role based or feature-based installation.
3. Select Server Roles.
4. Remote Desktop Services > select Remote Desktop Session Host.
5. Click Next and complete the RDS server roles for RDSH Server Sessions enablement.
Create the Golden Image for Horizon Linked Clone Desktops
To create the Golden Image, complete the following steps:
1. Select ESXi host in Infrastructure cluster and create a virtual machine to use as the Golden Image with windows 10 OS. We used windows 10, 64 bit OS for our testing.
For the virtual machine, the following parameters were used:
Memory : 2048MB
Processor : 2vCPU
Hard Disk : 32 GB
Network Adapter : 1 VMXNET3 type attached to VDI-DVS port-group on VMware Distributed Virtual
2. Attach the already downloaded Windows 10 LTSB Version Build 1607 to the virtual machine to complete the Windows 10 Master image installation.
3. Click Next.
4. Click Install now.
5. Accept the license terms.
6. Click Install windows.
Windows is installing.
The Windows installation is complete.
7. Customize the windows setup or use Express Settings.
8. Provide the User credentials for the windows VM created.
9. Reboot the Windows VM and install additional software as applicable.
VMware Horizon Agent Installation
To install the VMware Horizon Agent, complete the following steps:
1. Download VMware-viewagent-x86_64-7.3.1-6761332 version.
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads
2. Click the VMware Horizon Agent installer.
3. Click Next.
4. Accept the license agreement and click Next.
5. Select the default IPV4 and click Next.
6. Select the features to install.
7. Click Install.
8. Click Finish to complete the Horizon Agent installation on the Master image.
The same agent installation steps are applicable for the RDSH Server 2016 base Image you intend to use for RDS VMs.
Prerequisites
To set the Scope Options on the DHCP server hosting the Horizon target machines (for example, RDSH and VDI virtual machines), complete the following steps:
1. From the DHCP server, navigate to the Scope folder.
2. Set your options.
Provision Virtual Desktop Machines
To create VDI and RDS machines, complete the following steps:
1. Select the Master Target Device VM from the vSphere Client.
2. Right-click the VM and select Clone.
3. Name the cloned VM Desktop-Template.
4. Select the cluster and datastore where the first phase of provisioning will occur.
5. In case of RDSH VM, clone the RDS Master Image.
6. For Windows 10, follow the steps for cloning the Master Image for further deployment.
7. Change the memory to “Reserve all guest memory” (All locked).
8. Convert the VM to a Template for additional steps.
9.