VMware support for Virtual SteelFusion™ Edge Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA)

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information about VMware support for Virtual SteelFusion™ Edge Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA).

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0

Resolution

SteelFusion is a converged infrastructure solution, encompassing all branch services such as server, storage, networking, and WAN optimization. SteelFusion is a dual-ended system that comprises two logical components: SteelFusion Edge and SteelFusion Core. Core is a physical or virtual appliance in the data center that mounts all LUNs that need to be made available to applications and servers at the branch from the centralized storage array. Core appliances communicate across the WAN with the Edge appliances located at the branch. SteelFusion Edge is an appliance that is located at the branch, either provided by Riverbed or run on approved, commercial off-the-shelf hardware using Virtual SteelFusion Edge. The Edge appliance provides a virtualized environment that hosts the branch application servers. Edge also provides WAN optimization (depending on your order) and BlockStream-enabled storage. SteelFusion delivers local user performance to applications and data, while enabling the centralization of these applications and data, instant recovery, and lower total operating costs. You can access applications that run locally in your branch while the data is maintained and protected in your data center. Decoupling computation from its underlying storage allows your applications to run in a stateless mode, which reduces your branch footprint and centralizes management of your branch services.

Virtual SteelFusion Edge (vSFED) is a software-defined edge solution that extends SteelFusion to third-party commodity hardware. Virtual SteelFusion Edge acts as a virtual storage appliance to the underlying ESXi hypervisor, running on the host hardware by presenting storage through iSCSI. It also allows external hosts to access storage using the iSCSI protocol. A typical Virtual SteelFusion Edge deployment consists of a single ESXi host with a single vSFED virtual machine (VM). In the case of high availability (HA), two separate Virtual SteelFusion Edge VMs would be deployed on two separate vSphere hosts. You can make Virtual SteelFusion Edge highly available in an active/passive configuration, using iSCSI Multipath I/O (MPIO) for path failover. Virtual SteelFusion Edge enables consolidation and HA while providing most of the functionality of the physical SteelFusion Edge, with the following exceptions:

• Virtual Services Platform (VSP)
• Hardware reports, such as the Disk Status report
• Hardware-based alerts and notifications, such as RAID alarms

Virtual SteelFusion Edge uses a hybrid storage architecture with a combination of SSD-based cache and spinning HDD media. The boot disk of the Virtual SteelFusion Edge resides on a local VMFS datastore and requires a minimum of two RAID volumes. Virtual SteelFusion Edge consumes this storage and exports it to the ESXi host as a VMware datastore.

The Virtual SteelFusion Edge software can be installed on any hardware that complies with the Riverbed-provided reference hardware specification. We do not publish a hardware compatibility list; partners can choose hardware that complies with specifications.

Hardware Requirements

This table summarizes the hardware and software requirements for the appliance.

Storage requirements	Power-failure resistant RAID Controller with at least 512 MB of NVRAM, either super cap or battery backed. At least two SDD drives that are exported by the RAID controller as a single RAID 1/10 volume. At least two additional (SSD or HDD) drives that are exported by the RAID controller as a single RAID 1/10 volume. Virtual SteelFusion Edge supports an all SSD configuration with 2 RAID volumes exposed through RAID controller
VMware-certified server hardware	ESXi version 6.0 or later. System chipset must support VT-D/X (Intel’s device-level virtualization). Installation disk: a separate drive with at least 16 GB to install ESXi 6.0 (SDHC, flash, or M2 SATA port).
Network requirements	One network interface of at least 100 Mbps. Three network interfaces of at least 1000 Mbps. Two-port or four-port Riverbed bypass network interface card (NIC), or two to four additional network interfaces for virtual in-path configurations.
Memory	In addition to the memory required for Virtual SteelFusion Edge, there should be additional memory for customer virtual machines. For details, see the Virtual SteelFusion Edge documentation for more details.
CPU	In addition to CPU required for Virtual SteelFusion Edge, there should be additional CPU cores for customer virtual machines.
Supported bypass cards	For details, see the Virtual SteelFusion Edge documentation for details.