Bhumik Patel – Partner Architect, VMware @bhumikp
In June, we saw an announcement on FlexPod passing $3Billion in joint sales for Cisco and NetApp – which also means more customers continue to leverage the benefits of deploying the converged infrastructure for their applications. Over the years, VMware vSphere continues to be the leading platform for FlexPod solutions and majority of benefits for customers deploying FlexPod are around having pre-validated & tested solutions with co-operative support agreements between Cisco, NetApp and VMware. These pre-validated solutions are provided through Cisco Validated Design (CVDs) and the following latest CVDs on FlexPod with vSphere 5.5 are now available.
– vSphere 5.5 U1 design guide with NetApp FAS8000 with UCS B-200 M3 blades and C-240 M3 rack mount servers and Nexus 9000 standalone as detailed here.
– vSphere 5.5U1 design & deployment guides with NetApp FAS8040 with UCS B200-M3 blades and Nexus 5548UP as detailed here.
Along with comprehensive design and best practices, these architectures provide end to end validation of the FlexPod solution built on vSphere and this serves as the foundation for the co-operative support available to the customers based on the following support matrix as outlined in the document.
Deployment of workloads such as VMware Horizon on FlexPod provides customers with benefits of the platform level integrations such as leveraging latest storage architectures such as the NetApp All Flash FAS based solutions for Horizon 6.
In terms of management and orchestration for FlexPod, there is a choice provided in terms of which management product to leverage. With majority of FlexPod solutions based on vSphere, and tight automation integrations provided by vCloud Automation Center for provisioning both virtual resources on vSphere and physical components such as Cisco UCS and NetApp integrations through NetApp WFA (solutions TR-4306 and TR-4308), customers can successfully leverage VMware automation & cloud management for FlexPod.
If you are at VMworld 2014, you will find more details on the FlexPod CVDs with VMware at the NetApp Booth #1205.
