Virtual Cluster: Demo clusters in ESXi and vSphere

We here at Qumulo know how important it is to make the right decision for your organization's technology needs. Because of this, we provide a demonstration version of Qumulo Core with limited support from our Qumulo Care team.

IN THIS ARTICLE

Outlines the supported and unsupported hosts, configurations, and environments for OVA demo clusters in ESXi and vSphere

REQUIREMENTS

• VMware ESXi or VMware vSphere 5.5 or higher
• The latest Qumulo Core OVA, a VM file type that is compatible with ESXi and other virtualization products. 

DETAILS

With VMware Desktop and VMWare Fusion, you can use our OVA to launch a virtual Qumulo Cluster from anywhere to learn Qumulo Core's user interface and test our API. Customers are encouraged to run a virtual cluster to experience the Qumulo API first hand so that they can test scripts or develop software as needed.

This same OVA for VMWare Desktop can also be imported into a VMware ESXi or Vsphere environment for non-production use to evaluate Qumulo Core’s user experience and features including cluster upgrades, adding nodes to an existing cluster, and much more. 

Below are the requirements for using an OVA cluster with VMware ESXi or vSphere, including the requirements for the limited support that is currently offered by Qumulo for the free, non-production, virtual demonstration clusters.  

Supported Environments and Hosts

ESXi host:

• ESXi Host with any of the below Processors:
  • Intel Xeon E5-1620 to E5-1680 V2 series or newer
  • Intel Xeon E5-26xx V2 or newer
  • Intel Xeon E5-48xx V4 series
  • Intel Xeon E7 V2 through V4 series processors
• ESXi Host Memory Requirements:
  • 12GB of RAM Minimum—4GB of RAM to meet ESXi 6.5 Requirements plus a minimum of 2GB of RAM (4GB recommended) per Virtual Qumulo Node in a four-node cluster
• Virtual Networking
  • Standard vSwitch (Virtual Switch) from VMWare
  • A single VMXNET3 Virtual Network Card per Virtual Node
  • IPv4 and IPv6 link-local is a requirement for forming a Virtual Cluster. IPv6 may be isolated to a single ESXi host.
    
• Backing Storage
  • Any Qumulo Cluster over NFS
  • Local Host Storage of two or more SATA III drives in a RAID 0, RAID5, or better
  • SSDs are recommended but not required.

NOTE: Qumulo OVAs can be deployed on Vsphere with the "vmware web-client (vca)" option. The "vpxclient" option is not supported.  

Unsupported Configurations, VMWare Features, and Environments

• Cloning a deployed VM after the VM has been powered on. 
  • Qumulo Core will encode the MAC address the node was first booted with and will not discover other nodes that have the same mac address encoded in their configurations. 
• Virtual Hardware configuration changes to Virtual Nodes
• Virtual Clusters spanning hosts OR running Virtual Nodes on more than one host
• VMotion (Compute or Storage) of running Virtual Nodes or Virtual Clusters
• VMware hardware passthrough technologies VMDirectPath I/O passthrough devices

Keep in mind that occasionally there may be changes to virtual machine, disk images and volumes that will prevent an upgrade from one version of Qumulo Core to the next while running with a virtualized environment. 

NOTE: Other storage configurations may function for evaluation purposes but are not supported.

RESOLUTION

You should now be able to successfully utilize Qumulo's OVA for a demonstration cluster in ESXi and vSphere

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Video: Create a Qumulo virtual cluster on a Mac

Video: Create a Qumulo virtual cluster on Windows

Virtual Cluster: Create a virtual cluster running Qumulo Core

QQ CLI: Comprehensive List of Commands

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