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VPLEX Architecture

VPLEX is deployed as a cluster consisting of engines, directors, and a management server. It provides three configurations: local within a data center, metro across two close data centers, and geo across two distant data centers. VPLEX uses a distributed cache and mirroring to provide consistent access to distributed volumes between clusters.

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Abhi Nadipally
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66 views

VPLEX Architecture

VPLEX is deployed as a cluster consisting of engines, directors, and a management server. It provides three configurations: local within a data center, metro across two close data centers, and geo across two distant data centers. VPLEX uses a distributed cache and mirroring to provide consistent access to distributed volumes between clusters.

Uploaded by

Abhi Nadipally
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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VPLEX Architecture

VPLEX is deployed as a cluster consisting of one, two, or four engines (each containing two directors), and a
management server. A dual-engine or quad-engine cluster also contains a pair of Fibre Channel switches for
communication between directors. Each engine is protected by a standby power supply (SPS), and each Fibre
Channel switch gets its power through an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). (In a dual-engine or quad-
engine cluster, the management server also gets power from a UPS.) The management server has a public
Ethernet port, which provides cluster management services when connected to the customer network. This
server provides the management interfaces to VPLEX — hosting the VPLEX web server process that serves
the VPLEX GUI and REST-based web services interface, as well as the command line interface (CLI) service.
In the VPLEX Metro and VPLEX Geo configurations, the VPLEX Management Consoles of each cluster are
inter-connected using a virtual private network (VPN) that allows for remote cluster management from a local
VPLEX Management Console. When the system is deployed with a VPLEX Witness, the VPN is extended to
include the Witness as well.

EMC VPLEX provides three types of configuration:

 VPLEX Local - a VPLEX cluster within a single data center.


 VPLEX Metro - two VPLEX clusters located within or across multiple data centers separated by up to
5ms of RTT latency. VPLEX Metro systems are often deployed to span between two data centers that
are close together (~100 km), but they can also be deployed within a single data center for applications
requiring a high degree of local

availability.
 VPLEX Geo - two VPLEX clusters located within or across multiple data centers separated by up to
50 ms of RTT latency. VPLEX Geo uses an IP-based protocol over the Ethernet WAN COM link that
connects the two VPLEX clusters. This protocol is built on top of the UDP Data Transfer (UDT)
protocol, which runs on top of the Layer 3 User Datagram Protocol

(UDP). 
VPLEX Metro and VPLEX Geo systems optionally include a Witness. The Witness is implemented as a
virtual machine and is deployed in a separate fault domain from two VPLEX clusters. The Witness is used to
improve application availability in the presence of site failures and inter-cluster communication loss.

The VPLEX operating system is GeoSynchrony (currently version 5.3) designed for highly
available, robust operation in geographically distributed environments.

VPLEX global distributed cache and modes


VPLEX Local and Metro both use the write-through cache mode. When a write request is received from a host
to a virtual volume, the data is written through to the back-end storage volume(s) that map to the volume.
When the array(s) acknowledge this data, an acknowledgement is then sent back from VPLEX to the host
indicating a successful write.

VPLEX Geo uses write-back caching to achieve data durability without requiring synchronous operation. In
this cache mode VPLEX accepts host writes into cache and places a protection copy in the memory of another
local director before acknowledging the data to the host. The data is then sent asynchronously to the back-end
storage arrays. Cache vaulting logic within VPLEX stores any unwritten cache data onto local SSD storage in
the event of a power failure.

EMC VPLEX distributed cache

The individual memory systems of each VPLEX director are combined to form the VPLEX distributed cache.
Data structures within these memories in combination with distributed algorithms achieve the coherency and
consistency guarantees provided by VPLEX virtual storage. This guarantee ensures that the I/O behavior
observed by hosts accessing VPLEX storage is consistent with the behavior of a traditional disk. Any director
within a cluster is able to service an I/O request for a virtual volume served by that cluster. Each director
within a cluster is exposed to the same set of physical storage volumes from the back-end arrays and has the
same virtual-to-physical storage mapping metadata for its volumes. The distributed design extends across
VPLEX Metro and Geo systems to provided cache coherency and consistency for the global system. This
ensures that a host accesses
to a distributed volume always receive the most recent consistent data for that
volume.

Distributed virtual volume between data centers


VPLEX provides a distributed virtual volume - one of the most useful things for VMware Metro Storage
Cluster. The virtual volume is based on distributed mirroring that protects the data of a virtual volume by
mirroring it between the two VPLEX clusters:

 VPLEX Metro - based on Distributed RAID 1 volumes with write-through caching


 VPLEX Geo - based on Distributed RAID 1 volumes with write-back caching
Sharing data between sites (data centers)
VPLEX provides that the same data can be accessible to all users at all times — even if they are at different
sites. All changes made in one site shows up right away at the other site.

Examples of EMC VPLEX use cases


1. VMware Metro Storage Cluster - with VPLEX Metro, you can create a stretched VMware HA cluster
and with vMotion/DRS you can balance the cluster between data centers. Incase of failure, VMware HA
restarts VMs in the second data center.
2. Collaboration - applications in one data center need to access data in the other
data center.
3. Data Migration - moving applications and data across different storage installations — within the
same data center, across a campus, or within a geographical region.

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