Virtual Cluster: Demo clusters in ESXi and vSphere

To help you make the correct decision for your organization's technology needs, we offer a demonstration version of Qumulo Core with limited support from the Qumulo Care Team. This article explains the supported and unsupported hosts, configurations, and environments for OVA demo clusters in ESXi and vSphere.

REQUIREMENTS

• VMware ESXi or VMware vSphere 6.5 (or higher)
• The latest Qumulo Core OVA (a VM file compatible with ESXi and other virtualization products)

LAUNCHING A VIRTUAL QUMULO CLUSTER

To learn Qumulo Core's interface and explore its API, you can launch a virtual Qumulo Cluster from anywhere using VMware Desktop or VMWare Fusion with our OVA. We would like you to experience the Qumulo API by testing scripts and developing software using a virtual cluster.

To evaluate Qumulo Core's user experience and features, including cluster upgrades, adding nodes to an existing cluster, and more, you can import the same VMWare Desktop OVA into a VMware ESXi or vSphere environment for non-production use. 

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

Supported Environments, Hosts, and Requirements

ESXi Host with One of the Following 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
• Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Gold or better)

ESXi Host Memory

12GB of RAM Minimum

• 4 GB of RAM for ESXi
• 8 GB recommended (4GB minimum) 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 for forming a Virtual Cluster
  • You can isolate IPv6 to a single ESXi host.
    

Backing Storage

• Any Qumulo Cluster, over NFS
• Local Host Storage of two or more SATA III drives in RAID 0, RAID5, or better

NOTES:

• SSDs are recommended but aren't required.
• You can deploy Qumulo OVAs on vSphere using the vmware web-client (vca) option. The vpxclient option is unsupported.  

Unsupported Configurations, VMWare Features, and Environments

• Cloning a deployed VM after the VM powers on  
  • Qumulo Core encodes the MAC address that the node first booted with and doesn't discover other nodes that have the same mac address encoded in their configurations. 
• Virtual Hardware configuration changes to Virtual Nodes
• Virtual Clusters that:
  • Span hosts
  • Run Virtual Nodes on more than one host
• VMotion (Compute or Storage) for running Virtual Nodes or Virtual Clusters
• VMware hardware passthrough technologies for VMDirectPath I/O passthrough devices

NOTES:

• Occasionally, there are changes to virtual machines, disk images, and volumes that might prevent an upgrade from one version of Qumulo Core to the next in a virtual environment.
• For evaluation purposes, other storage configurations might be functional but unsupported.

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