11/1/21, 12:42 PM Cisco HyperFlex Study Notes (Part 1) | InfraPCS

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Cisco HyperFlex Study Notes (Part 1)

This post is my personal technical note for Cisco HyperFlex Hyperconverged Solution drafted during my per-
sonal learning.  This post is not intended to cover all the part of the solution and some note is based on my own
understanding of the solution. My intention to draft this note is to outline the key solution elements for quick
readers.

The note is based on Cisco HX Data Platform Release version 3.5. Some figures in this post are referenced from
Cisco public documents.

Solution Components:
The HyperFlex solution is composed by below components:

Hardware: Cisco HX Data Platform Server nodes (2-64)

Hardware: Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect (Except HX Edge)
Software: Customized Hypervisor (VMware/Hyper-V)
Software: CVM
Software: vCenter for VMware

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HX Server Node
Each HyperFlex HX node is composed by below hardware parts and varied by models

CPU
Memory
Physical disk (HDD/SSD, 1 dedicated SSD for housekeeping and 1 dedicated SSD for cache)
Network adapter

Each HyperFlex HX node includes by below software parts

Customized Hypervisor (VMware or Hyper-V)

IOVISOR (VIB for VMware) – Help to direct the IO to the required nodes. Independent from CVM
failure
Hypervisor API – Utilize Hypervisor API (for example VMware VAAI) to provide efficient storage oper-
ation, like File System based cloning (copy the index table for fast cloning).
Controller Virtual Machine (CVM)
CVM perform data search/dedup/compression/finding data/cache/log and etc.
Hypervisor pass through data to CVM and CVM pass data to physical disk.
CVM provide NFS datastore to hypervisor

Option to have converged node and computer only node

Converged Nodes or Computer-only Nodes options

Computer-only nodes still CVM and customized Hypervisor for IOVISOR
CVM in Computer-only nodes need much less CPU/Memory resources
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Cluster and File System

Key information about the cluster and file system is as per below

2-64 nodes expandable in single cluster

Support Stretched Cluster
Converged HX nodes are combined to form the distributed file system StorFS (Technology from
SpringPath, acquired by Cisco at 2017)
StorFS is a log-structure file system
RF2 (Redundancy Factor 2) or RF3 are available to choose during installation and can NOT be changed
without redeployment.

Disk based cache is available in each of HX server node

Where is cache drive? One SSD for each HX node for caching.
Read Cache – Only for Hybrid models (Most Frequently Use and Most Recently Used Caching Method)
Write Cache – Same usage for both Hybrid and All-flash models
Active (serving) / Passive (staging) cache
Data staging is triggered by active cache (When the active cache is full, the active and passive cache
are swapped.)
There are several levels in write cache determined by RF level
2 levels in RF2 write cache (Primary/Secondary)
3 levels in RF3 write cache (Primary/Secondary/Tertiary)

Write IO Data Flow (RF3 as example)

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Read IO Data Flow

All Flash model will always read from primary copy.

Hybrid model will read data evenly from all the data copies.

VMware VM_DIRECT_PATH feather is used to accelerate the read and write

……Continue read on second part as below link

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This entry was posted in Hyperconverged Solution, HyperFlex and tagged Cisco, Hyperconverged, HyperFlex,
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