Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture - Deployment of PCF on XC Series or XC Core with ...
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Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture Deployment of PCF on XC Series or XC Core with VMware vSphere environment. Dell EMC Engineering August 2018 A Dell EMC Reference Architecture
Revisions
Date Description
May 2017 Initial release
August 2018 Updates for XC Core.
The information in this publication is provided “as is.” Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this
publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Use, copying, and distribution of any software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.
Copyright © 2018 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell, EMC, and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Other
trademarks may be the property of their respective owners. Published in the USA. [8/28/2018] [Reference Architecture] [000023]
Dell EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.
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Table of contents
Revisions.............................................................................................................................................................................2
Executive summary.............................................................................................................................................................5
1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................6
1.1 Objective .............................................................................................................................................................6
1.2 Audience .............................................................................................................................................................6
1.3 Terms ..................................................................................................................................................................7
2 Technology overview ....................................................................................................................................................8
2.1 Dell EMC XC Series Hyper-converged appliances ............................................................................................8
2.1.1 Nutanix architecture ............................................................................................................................................9
2.2 Pivotal Cloud Foundry architecture ..................................................................................................................10
3 Solution reference architecture ..................................................................................................................................11
3.1 Network configuration .......................................................................................................................................11
3.2 Storage configuration .......................................................................................................................................13
4 Solution infrastructure components ............................................................................................................................14
4.1 Ops Manager ....................................................................................................................................................14
4.2 Elastic Runtime .................................................................................................................................................15
4.3 Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (cf CLI).............................................................................................16
4.4 Apps Manager ..................................................................................................................................................18
4.5 Nutanix Prism ...................................................................................................................................................19
5 Configuring and setting up PCF on XC Series ...........................................................................................................20
5.1 Solution validation.............................................................................................................................................20
5.1.1 Hello World .......................................................................................................................................................21
5.1.2 Spring Music .....................................................................................................................................................21
6 Best practices .............................................................................................................................................................22
6.1 Pivotal Cloud Foundry ......................................................................................................................................22
6.1.1 Networking ........................................................................................................................................................22
6.1.2 Availability Zones ..............................................................................................................................................23
6.1.3 Scaling ..............................................................................................................................................................23
6.2 Dell EMC XC Series .........................................................................................................................................24
7 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................................25
8 Technical support and resources ...............................................................................................................................26
9 Related resources ......................................................................................................................................................27
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A Solution configuration details .....................................................................................................................................28
A.1 Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) on XC Series in a VMware vSphere environment .............................................28
A.1.1 System configuration – XC Series with ESXi ...................................................................................................28
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Executive summary
Note: The information in this document applies to both Dell EMC XC Series Appliances, as well as the Dell
EMC XC Core System offering. Sections or information that apply to only one of the offerings (XC Series or
XC Core) will be called out explicitly.
The Dell EMC™ XC Series Hyper-converged Appliance powered by Nutanix™ delivers a highly resilient,
converged compute and storage platform that brings benefits of scalable architecture to business-critical
enterprise applications.
The XC Series platform is hypervisor agnostic and software installs quickly for deployment of multiple
virtualized workloads. The XC Series platform uses the Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) which
delivers a unified pool of storage from all appliances across the cluster, using techniques including striping,
replication, auto-tiering, error detection, failover, and automatic recovery. The XC Series platform delivers
storage through multiple protocols such as NFS, SMB, and iSCSI.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is a platform agnostic cloud computing platform that provides an on-demand
and scalable solution that enables rapid application development and deployment. It is hosted on virtualized
services on on-premises private infrastructure as well as in the cloud.
The combined solution allows developers and dev-ops professionals to quickly deploy a modern application
development platform on their on-premises infrastructure. The easy to use scaling functionality of the XC
Series and PCF allows the developer to focus on the application as a unit of scale rather than the
infrastructure or supporting services.
This document provides the reference architecture for deploying PCF onto Dell EMC XC Series hyper-
converged appliances in a VMware vSphere environment.
5 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A01
1 Introduction
The purpose of this reference architecture is to demonstrate the deployment and configuration of Pivotal
Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series hyper-converged appliances.
Note: This document provides a reference architecture that demonstrates deploying Pivotal Cloud Foundry
(PCF) based on a single-cluster configuration in a vSphere environment using minimal resources without
NSX from VMware.
This configuration is best used as a reference for a test lab or application development environment. It is not
intended to be used in a production level environment.
For more detailed best practices and other recommended reference architectures based on vSphere, refer
to Reference Architecture for Pivotal Cloud Foundry on vSphere located at: https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-
9/refarch/vsphere/vsphere_ref_arch.html
1.1 Objective
This paper presents:
• An overview of the Dell EMC XC Series Hyper-converged appliances
• An overview of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)
• An overview of how PCF integrates with the XC Series
• Benefits of using PCF with XC Series
• High-level configuration of XC Series with PCF installed
• Reference to documents that convey detailed steps on how to deploy and configure PCF
• Concluding thoughts on XC Series with PCF
1.2 Audience
This document is intended for cloud architects, cloud operators, and technical administrators of IT
environments who want a guide that demonstrates Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) on Dell EMC XC Series
Hyper-converged appliances in a VMware vSphere environment. You must be familiar with XC Series, Pivotal
Cloud Foundry technologies, VMware vSphere technologies, and have a basic familiarity with storage
virtualization, compute, and network technologies.
Business and end-user readers of this document must be familiar with general IT, cloud technologies, and
have an understanding of the relationship between their business, IT, and the application development
requirements that are part of multiple business units.
6 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A01
1.3 Terms
Useful terminology
Term Description
Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric DSF delivers a unified pool of storage from all appliances across the
(DSF) cluster, using techniques including striping, replication, auto-tiering,
error detection, failover, and automatic recovery.
Distributed Distributed means all data, metadata, and operations are distributed
across the entire cluster.
VMware NSX VMware NSX is a network virtualization and security platform. NSX
enables the creation of entire networks in software and embeds them
in the hypervisor layer. It’s an abstraction from the underlying physical
hardware.
Scale-out Scale-out increases performance linearly by adding capacity one
appliance at a time.
Software-defined Software-defined delivers all services through software using proven
Dell EMC hardware.
XC Series Cluster XC Series cluster are a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that
consolidates compute and storage into a single integrated appliance
and creates a distributed virtual computing platform. Each appliance
in the cluster runs an industry standard hypervisor and all the
appliances work together to form a cluster which is scalable.
XC Series Container XC Series container is a logical segmentation of the storage pool and
contains a group of VM or files.
7 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A01
2 Technology overview
This reference architecture conveys deployment integration points of Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC
Series Hyper-converged appliances.
2.1 Dell EMC XC Series Hyper-converged appliances
The Dell EMC XC Series hyper-converged appliances are a hyper-converged solution that combines storage,
compute, networking, and virtualization into an industry-proven x86 Dell PowerEdge™ server running Nutanix
software. By combining the hardware resources from each server appliance into a shared-everything model
for simplified operations, improved agility, and greater flexibility, Dell EMC and Nutanix together deliver
simple, cost-effective solutions for enterprise workloads. Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) delivers a
unified pool of storage from all appliances across the cluster, using techniques including striping, replication,
auto-tiering, error detection, failover, and automatic recovery.
The XC Series infrastructure is a scalable cluster of high-performance appliances, or servers, each running a
standard hypervisor and containing processors, memory, and local storage (consisting of solid state disk
(SSD) flash for high performance and high-capacity SATA disk drives). Each appliance runs virtual machines
just like a standard hypervisor host as displayed in Figure 1.
Nutanix appliance architecture
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2.1.1 Nutanix architecture
Nutanix software provides a hyper-converged platform that uses DSF to share and present local storage to all
the virtual machines in the cluster. The general Nutanix architecture is shown in Figure 2.
Nutanix architecture
DSF virtualizes the storage across all appliances and presents the same to the hypervisor as one large pool
of shared storage. The DSF replicates writes synchronously to at least one remote XC Series appliances to
ensure cluster resiliency and availability. Local storage for each XC Series appliance in the architecture is
presented as one large pool of shared storage to hypervisor.
In addition, DSF virtualizes local storage from all appliances into a unified pool. DSF uses local SSDs and
disks from all appliances to store virtual machine data. Virtual machines running on the cluster write data to
DSF as if they were writing to shared storage.
XC Series offers customer choice of hypervisors without being locked-in. The hypervisors covered in this
reference architecture are:
• VMware® ESXi®
In addition, the solution includes the Nutanix Controller VM (CVM), which runs the Nutanix software and
serves I/O operations for the hypervisor and all VMs running on that host. Each CVM connects directly to the
local storage controller and its associated disks thereby reducing the storage I/O latency. The data locality
feature ensures virtual machine I/O is served by the local CVM on the same hypervisor appliance, improving
the VM I/O performance regardless of where it runs.
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2.2 Pivotal Cloud Foundry architecture
Pivotal Cloud Foundry provides an enterprise-ready Cloud Native platform that abstracts virtualized
compute/storage/network resources and software stacks into an application platform especially well-suited to
run modern micro-services based applications.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is a commercial version of Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) that
supplies developers with a ready-to-use cloud computing environment with application services.
All of the application services are hosted by virtualized servers on existing on-premises (private) or off-
premises (public) infrastructure.
PCF is a structured cloud-native platform that is made up of standardized components and enables
developers with a rich set of services for deploying, scaling and managing the application lifecycles.
PCF enables operator visibility and control to manage the platform. The base PCF functionality that we
deployed in this RA offers the following features:
• Ops Manager
• Application deployment and management
• Polyglot (frameworks, languages, and services)
• Container management
• User management with role based access
• Performance monitoring and reporting
• Centralized log aggregation
• Security
• Fault tolerance and multiple resilience levels
10 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A013 Solution reference architecture
By combining Pivotal Cloud Foundry with XC Series in a VMware vSphere environment, enterprises can
painlessly create a full-featured, tightly integrated cloud platform based on open technologies.
The solution used for this RA was an on-premises (private) infrastructure that reflected the deployment of
PCF and promotion of applications onto PCF. The underlying infrastructure was based on the Dell EMC
XC630-10 appliance.
See Appendix A for details on the hardware and software configurations.
Figure 3 shows the PCF stack deployed on an ESXi hypervisor that is associated with a multi-TB container.
Dell EMC XC Series hyper-converged appliances with PCF overview.
XC Series and PCF are designed for maximum availability. They offer zero downtime upgrades to both
platform and applications. PCF enables developers to code in multiple languages and frameworks. PCF offers
a cloud computing environment for application developed services, all hosted on a scalable XC Series.
3.1 Network configuration
Figure 4 shows the network topology and interconnects used for this solution. This solution uses Dell
Networking S4048-ON switches.
Dell EMC recommends a minimum of two 10 GbE interfaces for each host. Each host should connect to dual
redundant switches for network path redundancy.
11 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A01Network components
Components Description
Data and management network 10 GbE switch
XC internode connection (VM traffic) 10 GbE switch
iDRAC inband network 1 GbE switch
Cabling SATA
Relationships between the different hardware layers and networking interconnects
12 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A013.2 Storage configuration
The XC Series provides virtualization at the storage layer. PCF VMs are all deployed onto containers that
have been created from pooled storage that is available from the XC Series Cluster. The PRISM
management GUI allows the customer to create the needed container datastores.
Containers are created from storage pools. In order to create a container you would select from the preferred
storage pool and mount the ESXi hosts to the container. See image below for an example of creating a
container.
View of Prism - XC Series Container provisioning
See Appendix A for details of hardware and software resources used for this RA.
13 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A014 Solution infrastructure components
The two main PCF components that you must install to stand-up PCF are Ops Manager and the Elastic
Runtime:
• Ops Manager is used to install and manage PCF products and services. It is used to deploy and
manage PCF and associated services.
• Elastic Runtime hosts the running applications and provides client access to the runtime environment.
Specific prerequisites must be adhered to before any deployment occurs, including:
• Reservation of a range of IP addresses
• Specific DNS entries for app hostnames pointing to the PCF router or your own load balancer
• Firewall and TCP port management
• Underlying XC Series Cluster must contain a minimum of 80 CPU cores
For more information on Pivotal vSphere Requirements, go to:
http://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-9/customizing/vsphere.html
4.1 Ops Manager
The Operations Manager (Ops Manager) is a GUI web application used to deploy and manage a Pivotal
Cloud Foundry (PCF). It is available through all major browsers. PCF foundational components and additional
tiles (services) can be deployed and configured through this web application.
For more information about how to use Ops Manager, go to:
http://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-9/customizing/index.html
Ops Manager Director – manages the PCF install
14 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A014.2 Elastic Runtime
Elastic Runtime is a complete, scalable runtime environment, extensible to most modern frameworks or
languages running on Linux. Deployed applications enjoy built-in services and can automatically bind to new
data services through a service broker or to an existing user-provided service.
For more information about Elastic Runtime, go to:
http://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-9/concepts/index.html
15 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A014.3 Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (cf CLI)
The Cloud Foundry CLI offers a rich set of commands to manage PCF after it is deployed. An alternative to
using cf CLI is the visual interface called Apps Manager.
Note: Apps Manager is a subset of cf CLI functionality. For more information about all the CLI commands, go
to: https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-9/cf-cli/index.html
16 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A01View of cf CLI management 17 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A01
4.4 Apps Manager
Apps Manager is a web-based tool to help manage organizations, spaces, applications, services, and users.
Apps Manager provides a visual interface for performing the following subset of functions available through
the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (cf CLI):
• Orgs: Create, manage, and delete orgs.
• Spaces: Create, manage, and delete spaces.
• Apps: Scale apps, bind apps to services, manage environment variables and routes, view logs and
usage information, start and stop apps, and delete apps.
• Services: Bind services to apps, unbind services from apps, choose and edit service plans, and
rename and delete service instances.
• Users: Invite new users, manage user roles, and delete users.
For more information about how to use Apps Manager, go to:
http://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-9/console/index.html
View of Apps Manager
18 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A014.5 Nutanix Prism
Prism is a rich graphical HTML-based management console for configuring, managing, and monitoring all
components within the infrastructure. It provides excellent performance monitoring and analytic capabilities. It
also gathers certain data from VMware vSphere and displays all relevant information through a single Prism
interface.
Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) virtualizes the storage across all nodes and presents the same to
the hypervisor as one large pool of shared storage.
Local storage for each XC Series node in the architecture is presented as one large pool of shared storage to
the hypervisor. The storage on the XC Series appliances is presented in 2 layers: “Storage Pools” and
“Containers”.
A container is a partition that is abstracted from the storage pool and presented to the hypervisor. This
container acts as the datastore in case of ESXi hypervisor. The Container(s) provide the datastores that will
be used for deployment of the required PCF VMs.
Nutanix Prism
19 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A015 Configuring and setting up PCF on XC Series
Use this overview of required setup steps to properly deploy PCF and for application support.
Required configuration and setup steps
Task Description
Creating containers in PRISM Prior to PCF deployment, you must create a storage container in
PRISM. This is the location where PCF VMs will be deployed.
Deploy and configure Operations Operations Manager provides a graphical interface to manage the
Manager deployment and upgrade of PCF components like Elastic Runtime,
additional services, and partner products.
Deploy and configure Elastic Elastic Runtime is a complete, scalable runtime environment,
Runtime extensible to most modern frameworks or languages running on
Linux. Deployed applications enjoy built-in services and can
automatically bind to new data services through a service broker or
to an existing user-provided service.
Create, obtain and push applications Create or obtain applications to push to PCF
to PCF
For detailed information about how to deploy Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Hyper-converged
appliances, see the Pivotal Cloud Foundry on VMware vSphere using Dell EMC XC Series Hyper-converged
Appliances Deployment Guide found at https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/converged-
infrastructure/xcseries/technical-resources.htm
5.1 Solution validation
To validate the PCF solution that was deployed on the XC Series, there were two applications that were
pushed: Dotnet Core Hello World app and the Spring Music app from the Cloud Foundry samples at Github.
These applications were pushed to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) deployment to verify that the PCF
solutions was deployed properly. The web pages for each application were accessed from a remote system.
For more details on how the applications were downloaded, prepared, pushed, and validated, see the Pivotal
Cloud Foundry on VMware vSphere using Dell EMC XC Series Hyper-converged Appliances Deployment
Guide found at https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/converged-infrastructure/xcseries/technical-resources.htm
20 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A015.1.1 Hello World
Image below shows the result of the Hello World application that was pushed to PCF deployment.
5.1.2 Spring Music
Image below shows the result of the Spring Music application that was pushed to PCF deployment.
21 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A016 Best practices
NOTE: The configuration used in this reference architecture is best used for a test lab or application
development environment. However, the best practices outlined below are for use in a production level
environment.
6.1 Pivotal Cloud Foundry
For the XC Series Cluster, start with a minimum of 80 cores to support a standard PCF deployment.
Start with a minimum size of 2 TB when creating an XC Series container datastore. This is where PCF will be
creating and deploying all of its required services VMs. In addition, it allows for further scaling to support
application development and promotion.
For best practice considerations for designing and running applications in PCF, go to:
https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-9/devguide/deploy-apps/prepare-to-deploy.html
For more information about best practice considerations for Cloud Foundry Security, go to:
https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-9/security/index.html
6.1.1 Networking
This RA focuses on the deployment of PCF on XC Series appliances. The appliances, networks, and
interconnects deployed were required for a stand-alone XC Series Cluster with High-Availability (HA) applied
at the XC Series appliance level (meeting the requirement of 3+ appliances in a cluster).
For the PCF deployment, the networking design consisted of a single VLAN with 50 IP addresses reserved for
infrastructure and PCF resources.
For more detail on the network topology that was used, see chapter 3.1.
Note: For each PCF deployment, Pivotal recommends at least 4 networks: Infrastructure, Deployment, CF
Tiles, and Dynamic Services.
For more details and best practices on Networking for PCF, see the Reference Architecture for Pivotal Cloud
Foundry on vSphere at:
https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-9/refarch/vsphere/vsphere_ref_arch.html#networking
22 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A016.1.2 Availability Zones
AZs are a functionally independent segment of network infrastructure that are assigned by an operator.
Availability Zones (AZs) are assigned to a cluster and resource pool in vSphere.
During product updates and platform upgrades, the VMs in a deployment restart in succession, rendering
them temporarily unavailable. During outages, VMs go down in a less orderly way. Spreading components
across Availability Zones and scaling them to a sufficient level of redundancy maintains high availability
during both upgrades and outages and can ensure zero downtime.
Deploying Pivotal Cloud Foundry across three or more AZs and assigning multiple component instances to
different AZ locations lets a deployment operate uninterrupted when entire AZs become unavailable. Pivotal
Cloud Foundry maintains its availability as long as a majority of the AZs remain accessible. For example, a
three-AZ deployment stays up when one entire AZ goes down, and a five-AZ deployment can withstand an
outage of up to two AZs with no impact on uptime.
Note: For each PCF deployment, Pivotal recommends 3 Availability Zones. Each AZ should correspond to
one of the resource pools from each cluster.
For more details and best practices for the implementation and use of Availability Zones, see the Reference
Architecture for Pivotal Cloud Foundry on vSphere at:
https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-9/refarch/vsphere/vsphere_ref_arch.html
6.1.3 Scaling
XC Series Cluster scaling allows simplicity in the vSphere design. Adding any additional appliances increases
compute plus storage capacity. You can allocate any additional storage for each scaling to vSphere through
the context of an XC Series container.
Note: There is no downtime involved anywhere in scaling out a Dell EMC XC Series Cluster.
To scale (expand) an XC Series cluster, use XC Series tools (like PRISM) to add another appliance to the
cluster. After an additional appliance is added to the cluster, the XC Series storage pool’s capacity will be
expanded.
See following link for more details for XC Series cluster scaling: (Requires login to Nutanix Portal)
https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId==Web-Console-Guide-Prism-v50:Web-Console-
Guide-Prism-v50
23 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A01When XC Series clusters are scaled out by adding appliances, PCF can scale out with the added capacity.
Additionally, the number PCF instances can be increased as well by adding additional resource pools. For
more details about Scaling, see the Reference Architecture for Pivotal Cloud Foundry on vSphere go to:
https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-9/refarch/vsphere/vsphere_ref_arch.html#scale
https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-9/concepts/high-availability.html
6.2 Dell EMC XC Series
For more information about the latest technical content and best practices for the XC Series, go to the
following link:
https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/converged-infrastructure/xcseries/technical-resources.htm
24 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A017 Conclusion
The reference architecture for Pivotal Cloud Foundry deployment on XC Series is tested and designed for fast
deployment, ease of scale, and simple operation of Pivotal Cloud Foundry infrastructure. PCF is a simple,
scalable and agile cloud native solution, with enhanced security and automation.
By combining PCF with XC Series, customers can achieve the following for their business IT solutions:
• Rapid time to value with greater agility and security
• Infrastructure on demand, which offers predictable cost and performance
• Mission critical data services for ultimate efficiency
• PCF vertical and horizontal scaling available through XC Series scaling
XC Series exceeds all minimum infrastructure requirements for PCF on vSphere for small to large PCF
deployments.
The number of application instances pushed to PCF is dependent on the total available resources and
requirements of each application.
Using XC Series as the hardware platform of choice simplifies and accelerates the time to value and lets you
quickly scale up to support larger PCF deployments.
For detailed steps that demonstrates the deployment of PCF on a Dell EMC XC Series Hyper-converged
appliances, see the Pivotal Cloud Foundry on VMware vSphere using Dell EMC XC Series Hyper-converged
Appliances Deployment Guide found at: https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/converged-
infrastructure/xcseries/technical-resources.htm
For more detailed best practices and other recommended reference architectures based on vSphere, refer to
Reference Architecture for Pivotal Cloud Foundry on vSphere located at: https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-
9/refarch/vsphere/vsphere_ref_arch.html
25 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A018 Technical support and resources
• Dell.com/support is focused on meeting customer needs with proven services and
support.Dell.com/support is focused on meeting customer needs with proven services and support.
• XC Series and XC Core Technical Resource Center is an online technical community where IT
professionals have access to numerous resources for Dell EMC XC Series Hyper-converged appliances.
26 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A019 Related resources
See the following referenced or recommended resources related to this document:
Note: The links below are open to customers although some may require registration for access.
• Nutanix Bible: http://nutanixbible.com/
• Nutanix blog: http://longwhiteclouds.com/
• Acropolis Block Services: http://go.nutanix.com/rs/031-GVQ-112/images/acropolis-block-services.pdf
• Reference Architecture for Pivotal Cloud Foundry on vSphere: https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-
9/refarch/vsphere/vsphere_ref_arch.html
• Pivotal PCF Install Instructions on vSphere: https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-
9/customizing/vsphere.html
• For sizing estimates and guidance on the total amount of resources that are required for PCF, go to
the PCF Sizing Tool site located at: http://pcfsizer.cfapps.io/
• Dell EMC Tech Center for XC Series: https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/converged-
infrastructure/xcseries/technical-resources.htm
27 Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Dell EMC XC Series Appliances or XC Core System - Reference Architecture | 000023 | A01A Solution configuration details
A.1 Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) on XC Series in a VMware vSphere
environment
For information about how to deploy Pivotal Cloud Foundry on a Dell EMC XC Series solution, see the Pivotal
Cloud Foundry on VMware vSphere using Dell EMC XC Series Hyper-converged Appliances Deployment
Guide found at http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/storage/w/wiki/11457.advanced-materials
A.1.1 System configuration – XC Series with ESXi
XC Series with ESXi system configuration
System configuration: hardware and software components Description
XC Series 4 x XC630-10 @ 1U: Several PCF VMs
• Firmware/BIOS: 2.3.4 were installed on XC
• Hypervisor: ESXi 6.0 u1 + (KB 2125229 and appliance.
KB 2120255)
• AOS: 4.7.5.2
• 2 x Intel Xeon® CPU E5-2630 v4 2.20 Ghz
• 384 GB RAM (16 x 32 GB DIMMS)
• 2 x 800GB SATA SSD drives
• 8 x 1TB SATA drives
• 1 x Intel ® X520
PCF Management • Ops Manager: 1.9.6.0 Key PCF components
• Elastic Runtime: v1.9.11-build 6 deployed.
PCF VMs • PCF VMs Several VMs created
• Hosted on XC Container - Capacity: 4 TB by PCF standard
deployment.
Network • 2 x Dell Networking S4048-ON switches Dual redundant
switches were used for
high availability
Monitoring • Nutanix Prism Monitoring for XC
• VMware vCenter Series Cluster is done
• Apps Manager using Nutanix PRISM
• cf CLI and vCenter.
PCF Apps Manager for
monitoring PCF and
applications. cf CLI
also covers levels of
management.
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