HPE0-V27 - HPE Edge-to-Cloud Solutions

 To add HPE GreenLake for Block Storage to an existing HPE GreenLake account, you need to provide some basic information to the wizard-driven application in HPE GreenLake Central. According to the HPE GreenLake for Block Storage Getting Started Guide1, you need to enter the following information:

• Site contact info: This includes the name, email, and phone number of the person who will be the primary contact for the site where the block storage service will be deployed. This is required to ensure smooth communication and coordination between HPE and the customer.
• Subscription term: This is the duration of the contract for the block storage service, which can range from 12 to 60 months. This is required to calculate the monthly billing and the minimum committed capacity for the service.

The other options are not required for the wizard. Reserved capacity is the amount of storage capacity that the customer wants to reserve for future use, which can be adjusted later. HPE customer ID is a unique identifier for the customer, which is already associated with the existing HPE GreenLake account. Datacenter address is the physical location of the datacenter where the block storage service will be deployed, which is already known to HPE from the previous HPE GreenLake service. References:

• HPE GreenLake for Block Storage Getting Started Guide
• HPE GreenLake for Block Storage planning overview

HPE Alletra 9000 is a cloud-native data infrastructure that delivers a cloud experience for mission-critical workloads. It is designed to provide extreme low-latency, reliability, and performance density in a 4U enclosure. Some of the business values of HPE Alletra 9000 are:

• 100% uptime guarantee: HPE Alletra 9000 ensures resiliency with a guaranteed 99.9999% data availability, backed by the HPE Alletra Availability Guarantee program1. It also offers built-in data protection, replication, and disaster recovery capabilities to safeguard data from any eventuality2.
• Enterprise scalability and performance: HPE Alletra 9000 delivers consistent sub-millisecond latency and up to 15M IOPS for the most demanding applications1. It also supports massive scalability, with up to 96 NVMe drives and 6PB of raw capacity per system, and up to 4 systems in a single namespace2. HPE Alletra 9000 can also easily extend to the cloud with consistent data services and native integration with cloud platforms3.

References: HPE Alletra 9000 | HPE Store Australia, Document Display | HPE Support Center, Transform Your Business with the HPE Alletra 9000 Series

HPE SimpliVity is a hyperconverged infrastructure solution that combines compute, storage, networking, and data services in a single appliance1. HPE SimpliVity clusters are groups of HPE SimpliVity nodes that share the same federation and data center2. HPE SimpliVity clusters can be expanded by adding new nodes to increase the capacity and performance of the cluster3.

However, adding new nodes with newer generation Intel CPUs to an existing HPE SimpliVity cluster may cause compatibility issues for vMotion, the VMware technology that enables live migration of virtual machines between hosts4. vMotion requires that the source and destination hosts have compatible CPUs, meaning that they support thesame set of CPU features4. If the new nodes have different or additional CPU features than the existing nodes, vMotion may fail or be restricted4.

To facilitate adding the new hosts to the cluster, one possible solution is to enable Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) on the cluster5. EVC is a feature of VMware vSphere that ensures vMotion compatibility for the hosts in a cluster that are running different CPU generations5. EVC masks the CPU features that are not common among all hosts in the cluster, so that all hosts present the same CPU feature set to the virtual machines5. This way, vMotion can be performed without CPU compatibility errors5.

To enable EVC on the cluster, the following steps are required5:

• Power off all virtual machines in the cluster, or migrate them to another cluster.
• Edit the cluster settings and select the EVC mode that corresponds to the baseline CPU feature set for the cluster. The EVC mode must be equivalent to or a subset of the feature set of the host with the smallest feature set in the cluster.
• Add the new hosts to the cluster and verify that they are compatible with the EVC mode.
• Power on the virtual machines in the cluster, or migrate them back from another cluster.

By enabling EVC, the cluster can benefit from the improved vMotion compatibility and flexibility of adding new hosts with newer generation Intel CPUs. However, enabling EVC also has some limitations and trade-offs, such as5:

• EVC does not allow vMotion between hosts with different CPU vendors, such as AMD and Intel.
• EVC does not prevent vMotion from failing for other reasons, such as network or storage incompatibility.
• EVC may prevent virtual machines from accessing some CPU features that are available on newer hosts, but not on older hosts.
• EVC may not work with some applications that do not follow the CPU vendor recommended methods of feature detection.

Therefore, enabling EVC should be carefully planned and tested before adding the new hosts to the cluster.

References:

• 1: HPE SimpliVity
• 2: HPE SimpliVity User Guide
• 3: HPE SimpliVity Expansion Installation and Startup Service
• 4: VMware EVC and CPU Compatibility FAQ
• 5: About Enhanced vMotion Compatibility