Cisco Hyperflex

[m_bekrar]

Dear Cisco community, 

I need your advice about using hyperflex for an educational platform (MOOC). Is it true Hyperflex is not recommended for streaming solutions?

Thank you;   

[Clifford Aldan · Accepted solution]

Hello, m_bekrar

Can you provide more information regarding the requirements for your MOOC solution?

HyperFlex is a VDI (virtual desktop) or VSI (virtual server) solution 

Its architecture is not the ideal design for streaming highly sequential and big I/O workloads

HyperFlex dedupes and compresses out of the box and data is replicated across converged nodes for redundancy and high availability 

At its current offering, vSphere is the only supported hypervisor that can be installed bare metal to the nodes 

Depending on the storage density of your streaming solution, you may consider going with a standard C-series server like the UCS C240 or C3260, to install your flavor of OS bare metal and be able to scale base on the storage size your MOOC solution requires to function

[praetoleiad]

Can VMs on hyperflex cluster connect to external storage via nfs or iscsi?

[Dan]

From within the guest, yes, you can access iSCSI or NFS.  You would map it up in the same way as anything else.

If you are asking about the hosts, then it gets more murky.  Technically, yes, this can be done, but I'm not sure if there's anything Cisco says about that from a supportability standpoint.

[Clifford Aldan]

Hi, praetoleiad

With HX version 1.8, connecting to external storage via iSCSI, NFS, FC is supported

1.8 software requirements

• HX Installer: 1.8.1a or 1.8.1b
• HX Data Platform: 1.8.1a or 1.8.1b
• UCS Firmware: 3.1(2b)
• ESXi Version: 6.0 U1b, 6.0 U2, 6.0 U2 Patch 3

Reference: Cisco HyperFlex Systems HX Data Platform Pre-Install Checklist

[praetoleiad]

Hi Clifford,

Thank you for the response and the document but I can't see statement mentioning FC and ISCSI support for HyperFlex.

[Clifford Aldan]

Hi, praetoleiad

That statement is mentioned in the Cisco HyperFlex Systems Getting Started Guide, Release 1.8

Review "Table 1 New Features in HX Release 1.8"