Requirements

Introduction

This page describes the infrastructure environment within which the Fort Technologies MyWorld Cloud Management Software may be deployed. It details the technical requirements of each part of the environment. Some of this infrastructure may already be in place within your organisation and the integration with your existing infrastructure and services, especially network, must be considered while designing and planning a deployment.
The diagram below gives an overview of the infrastructure required. This infrastructure is made up of three parts:
1. The virtualised infrastructure, including hosts running a hypervisor (e.g. VMware ESX, Xen etc) and shared storage, which will be managed by Fort’s application.
2. The network infrastructure providing intra and Internet access.
3. The management host onto which the Fort software is installed.
The MyWorld Software is capable of managing different hypervisor types within a single infrastructure. The infrastructure may be in a resilient configuration or standalone. Dotted lines in the diagram below indicate resilient components.

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Minimum Infrastructure Requirements

The minimum requirements for an initial deployment will be closely tied to the product set that you wish to offer and your initial target customers, as this will drive the minimum initial capacity and performance and also the expandability of the solution.
An initial deployment would include the following components:

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Server considerations

On the server side, there are four main considerations: CPU, RAM, I/O & Network and form factor.

First, use CPUs which have HW support for virtualisation and at least four cores, such as the Intel 55xx/65xx/75xx or AMD 83xx/84xx processors.

Second deploy as much memory as possible. In a virtualised environment you will run out of memory far before you run out of processing power. Consider 32GB per 4 core CPU as the minimum.

Third, you’ll need multiple network and I/O ports for network & storage traffic. Min 2 NICs for network traffic and 2 for management traffic plus 2 I/O ports (iSCSI, FC, FCoE).

Fourth, individual servers or blade chassis plus server blades, this comes down to two opposing decisions; initial upfront cost and resilience. You need two blade chassis plus blades for resilience which is a considerable initial upfront cost, but over the lifetime will probably be more cost effective. Be aware that blade chassis may lock you into a manufacturer for the blades. Probably best to go with individual boxes initially and then add chassis & blades to add capacity as your requirements ramp up.

Storage considerations

Again this is a cost versus performance decision driven by your target customers. Will you be selling a product set aimed at general purpose computing or high performance with large data sets. If the answer is the latter, then Fibre Channel based storage, including FC drives, is probably required, but will be expensive. For general purpose usage, iSCSI storage is the best option and there are many manufacture’s products which are VMWare certified. Multiple GigE connectivity with bonding & jumbo frame support is required. RAID 6 and above with hot spare is recommended. SAS is faster than SATA.

Network considerations

The key point in choosing network components is that all elements in the network, including the firewalls, must be capable of supporting VLANs and VLAN trunking (802.1q). Most modern network equipment is capable of this. If the equipment supports ‘sub interfaces’ then it is most likely to be suitable.
Capacity and performance is the next consideration. This not only must cover throughput (Mbps/pps), but also the maximum number of VLANs/sub interfaces supported and in the case of the firewalls, the number of policies supported. If you wish to offer your customers the ability to access their environment via VPN, then VPN support and performance must be considered. The bandwidth required will depend on the type of environments which you are deploying for your customers e.g. what applications are deployed and how many concurrent users are active. Allow 1-5Mbps of external connectivity per virtual server deployed. Remember that your customer download speed is your upload speed, so that an asymmetrical connection may not suitable for your Internet connection as the upload speed may not be sufficient.

Example configuration

Taking all of the above into consideration, an example initial configuration may look something like the following. Note that this example configuration is intended to give a flavour of what is required and not specify a requirement e.g. HP or IBM servers/blades, Equalogic or EMC storage, DELL, HP, Juniper network may be used. Which manufacturer and model is chosen may well be influenced by the skill sets available within your organisation and the end customer products being sold off the platform as much as the technical specifications of the equipment.

ESX hosts: 2 x DELL PowerEdge R610, 2 x E5630 CPU, 64GB RAM, 2 x 146GB RAID 1, 2 NICs (In addition to the four on board)

Storage: 1 x DELL PowerVault MD3200i iSCSI SAN Storage Array, 12 x 450GB 15K SAS or 500GB/1TB Near Line SAS

VCenter & Management hosts: 2 x DELL PowerEdge R415, AMD 4122 CPU 8GB RAM, 3 x 146GB RAID 1 + hot spare

Note that both the VCenter & Management hosts could be run either on older type servers or indeed together by virtualising a new or existing box with ESXi. Failure of either or both of the VCenter and management box will NOT cause a service outage on the VMs or network components.

Network switches: Cisco Catalyst 3560
Firewalls: Juniper SSG 140
Routers: Cisco 7201
Note that it may also be possible to collapse the firewall and router into a single multifunction piece of equipment such as the Cisco ASR or Juniper J Series.