Flex. Pod Datacenter with VMware v. Sphere 6. 5 Design Guide. Cisco Validated Designs consist of 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 our customers. Goal 1 The Dream Begins. This document describes the Cisco and Net. App Flex. Pod solution, which is a validated approach for deploying Cisco and Net. App technologies as shared cloud infrastructure. This validated design provides a framework for deploying VMware v. Sphere, the most popular virtualization platform in enterprise class data centers, on Flex. Any New Hardware Or Software Is Properly Installed Golf. Pod. Flex. Pod is a leading integrated infrastructure supporting a broad range of enterprise workloads and use cases. This solution enables customers to quickly and reliably deploy VMware v. Sphere based private cloud on integrated infrastructure. The recommended solution architecture is built on Cisco Unified Computing System Cisco UCS using the unified software release to support the Cisco UCS hardware platforms including Cisco UCS B Series blade and C Series rack servers, Cisco UCS 6. Fabric Interconnects, Cisco Nexus 9. Series switches, Cisco MDS Fibre channel switches, and Net. App All Flash series storage arrays. In addition to that, it includes VMware v. Sphere 6. 5, which provides a number of new features for optimizing storage utilization and facilitating private cloud. Cisco and Net. App have carefully validated and verified the Flex. Pod solution architecture and its many use cases while creating a portfolio of detailed documentation, information, and references to assist customers in transforming their data centers to this shared infrastructure model. This portfolio includes, but is not limited to the following items          Best practice architectural design         Workload sizing and scaling guidance         Implementation and deployment instructions         Technical specifications rules for what is a Flex. Pod configuration         Frequently asked questions and answers FAQs         Cisco Validated Designs CVDs and Net. App Validated Architectures NVAs covering a variety of use cases. Cisco and Net. App have also built a robust and experienced support team focused on Flex. Pod solutions, from customer account and technical sales representatives to professional services and technical support engineers. The support alliance between Net. App and Cisco gives customers and channel services partners direct access to technical experts who collaborate with cross vendors and have access to shared lab resources to resolve potential issues. Flex. Pod supports tight integration with virtualized and cloud infrastructures, making it the logical choice for long term investment. Flex. Pod also provides a uniform approach to IT architecture, offering a well characterized and documented shared pool of resources for application workloads. Flex. Pod delivers operational efficiency and consistency with the versatility to meet a variety of SLAs and IT initiatives, including          Application rollouts or application migrations         Business continuity and disaster recovery         Desktop virtualization         Cloud delivery models public, private, hybrid and service models Iaa. S, Paa. S, Saa. S         Asset consolidation and virtualization. Industry trends indicate a vast data center transformation toward shared infrastructure and cloud computing. Business agility requires application agility, so IT teams need to provision applications quickly and resources need to be able to scale up or down in minutes. Flex. Pod Datacenter is a best practice data center architecture, designed and validated by Cisco and Net. App to meet the needs of enterprise customers and service providers. Create a customer support account to get access to support features. Please note Customers must have an active service plan to gain access to the support site. Ive been running an Iomega IX4 in my home vSphere lab 24x7 for the past two years and have found it to be a nice reliable NAS device. Though like wi. With VMware Cloud on AWS, you use the same VMware Software Defined Data Center SDDC technology including vSphere, vSAN, NSX and vCenter, across your onpremises. It is server, storage, and hypervisor agnostic, supporting both softwaredefined storage and legacy SAN and NAS appliances, as well as VMwares vSphere hypervisor. A brandnew update to the VMware TCO Comparison Calculator is now available for you to compare the Total Cost of Ownership of VMware and Microsoft virtual. Flex. Pod Datacenter is built on Net. App All Flash FAS, Cisco Unified Computing System UCS, and the Cisco Nexus family of switches. These components combine to enable management synergies across all of a businesss IT infrastructure. Image/news/2008/12/image001.jpg' alt='Nas Vmware Appliance Linux' title='Nas Vmware Appliance Linux' />Flex. Pod Datacenter has been proven to be the optimal platform for virtualization and workload consolidation, enabling enterprises to standardize all of their IT infrastructure. Flex. Pod Datacenter with VMware v. Sphere 6. 5 introduces new hardware and software into the portfolio, enabling end to end 4. Gb. E along with native 1. Gb FC via the Cisco MDS Fibre Channel switch. New pieces which enable the move to 4. Gb include          Net. App AFF A3. 00         Cisco Nexus 9. PQ         VMware v. Sphere 6. 5a         Net. App ONTAP 9. 1         Cisco UCS 3. 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. Flex. Pod is a best practice datacenter architecture that includes the following components          Cisco Unified Computing System         Cisco Nexus switches         Cisco MDS switches         Net. App All Flash FAS AFF systems. These components are connected and configured according to the best practices of both Cisco and Net. App to provide an ideal platform for running a variety of enterprise workloads with confidence. Flex. Pod 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 Flex. Pod stacks. The reference architecture covered in this document leverages Cisco Nexus 9. Cisco MDS 9. 00. 0 for the SAN switching component. One of the key benefits of Flex. Pod is its ability to maintain consistency during scale. Each of the component families shown Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, and Net. App 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 Flex. Pod. Flex. Pod Datacenter is a flexible architecture that can suit any customer requirement. It allows you to choose a SAN protocol based on personal preferences or hardware availability. This solution highlights a 4. Gb. E i. SCSI end to end deployment utilizing the Cisco Nexus 9. PQ and a 1. 6Gb FC deployment utilizing the Cisco MDS 9. S. Both architectures use NFS volumes for generic virtual machine VM workloads and can optionally support 1. Gb Fiber Channel over Ethernet FCo. E. This design also supports 1. Gb i. SCSI and 8. Gb FC architecture using the Cisco UCS 6. Fabric Interconnect. Design 1 End to End 4. Gb. E i. SCSI Architecture. This design is suitable for customers who use IP based architecture in their datacenter, enabling them to upgrade to end to end 4. Gb. E. The components used in this design are          Net. App AFF A3. 00 storage controllers          High Availability HA pair in switchless cluster configuration          4. Gb. E adapter used in the expansion slot of each storage controller         ONTAP 9. Cisco Nexus 9. 33. PQ switches         Pair of switches in v. PC configuration          Cisco UCS 6. UP Fabric Interconnect         4. Gb Unified Fabric          Cisco UCS 5. Chassis         Cisco UCS 2. IOM         Cisco UCS B2. M4 servers with VIC 1. Cisco UCS C2. 20 M4 servers with VIC 1. Figure 2 illustrates the Flex.