Vblock Advanced Management Pod (AMP)

The AMP consists of the management components of a Vblock system, these management components are self-Contained and provide Out-of-Band Management for the entire Vblock Infrastructure. The servers and storage(in the case of AMP-2HA) that make up the AMP host all of the Vblock management applications in a dedicated environment separate from that of the production environment. This type of separation allows for the Vblock to operate even in the event of an AMP failure scenario.

Management Software stack:
Code versions and exact details of the AMP software management components are deterministic on the RCM (Release Code Matrix) level used to configure the Vblock. Here is an example of some of the core AMP management components:
– VMware vCenter Server Suite
– Unisphere for VNX|VMAX (RecoverPoint and VPLEX Optional)
– XtremIO XMS
– PowerPath Licensing Appliance
– EMC ESRS Appliances
– Cisco DCNM
– VCE Vision Intelligent Operations
– Cisco Nexus 1000v

AMP-2 Hardware
There are 3 AMP-2 models associated with the Vblock 340,540&740: AMP-2P | AMP-2RP | AMP-2HA

AMP-2P (“Physical”) – One Cisco UCS C220 dedicated Server to run the management workload.
AMP-2RP (“Redundant Physical”) – Two Cisco UCS C220 servers supports application and hardware redundancy.

The AMP-2HA includes 2 or 3 Cisco ‘C’ series servers for compute along with the highly available VNXe3200 storage array where the VM storage resides providing a redundant out-of-band management environment:
AMP-2HA BASE (“High Availability”) – Two Cisco UCS C220|240 servers and shared storage presented by a EMC VNXe3200 storage array.
AMP-2HA PERFORMANCE (“High Availability”) – Three Cisco UCS C220|240 servers and additional ‘FAST VP’ VNXe3200 storage.

Taking a look at the AMP-2HA Hardware stack:
The second generation of the Advanced Management Platform (AMP-2HA) is the high availability model of AMP-2HA that centralizes management components of the Vblock System and delivers out-of-band management.

Vblock 340: AMP-2HA ‘Base’ Hardware stack
2x C220 M3 SFF Server (1RU Per server)
2x 32 GB Flex Flash SD Card Modules (ESXi install location)
2x CPU Per server(2.4Ghz Ivy Bridge 6Cores Per CPU, 7.2GT/s QPI)
128GB RAM Per C220 (8x 16GB DDR3)
2x Cisco Nexus 3064-T Switch for management networking
VNXe 3200 Storage Array (25-Drive DPE loaded with 3x 100GB FAST Cache Drives & 11x 600GB 10K SAS 2.5″ Drives)

Vblock 340: AMP-2HA ‘Performance’ Hardware stack
3x C220 M3 SFF Server (1RU)
2x 32 GB Flex Flash SD Card Modules (ESXi install location)
2x CPU Per server(2.4Ghz Ivy Bridge 6Cores Per CPU, 7.2GT/s QPI)
128GB RAM Per C220 (8x 16GB DDR3)
VNXe 3200 Storage Array (25-Drive DPE loaded with 3x 100GB FAST Cache Drives, 6x 100GB FAST VP Drives & 11x 600GB 10K SAS 2.5″ Drives)

Vblock 540&740: AMP-2HA ‘Base’ Hardware stack
2x C240 M3 SFF Server (2RU Per Server)
2x 32 GB Flex Flash SD Card Modules (ESXi install location)
2x CPU Per server(2.4Ghz Ivy Bridge 6Cores Per CPU, 7.2GT/s QPI)
128GB RAM Per C240 (8x 16GB DDR3)
VNXe 3200 Storage Array (25-Drive DPE loaded with 3x 100GB FAST Cache Drives & 11x 600GB 10K SAS 2.5″ Drives)

Vblock 540&740: AMP-2HA ‘Performance’ Hardware stack
3x C240 M3 SFF Server (2RU)
2x 32 GB Flex Flash SD Card Modules (ESXi install location)
2x CPU Per server(2.4Ghz Ivy Bridge 6C)
128GB RAM Per C240 (8x 16GB DDR3)
VNXe 3200 Storage Array (25-Drive DPE loaded with 3x 100GB FAST Cache Drives, 6x 100GB FAST VP Drives & 11x 600GB 10K SAS 2.5″ Drives)

VxBlock 340,540 & 740 –  ‘The AMP2-HA Performance’ model is the default for VMware NSX deployments allowing each of the 3 NSX controllers to be dedicated to an ESXi host for redundancy and scalability.

References:

Click to access vblock-340-gen3-2-architecture-overview.pdf

Click to access vblock-540-gen2-0-architecture-overview.pdf

Click to access vblock-740-gen5-0-architecture-overview.pdf

Click to access C240M3_LFF_SpecSheet.pdf

Click to access C220M3_SFF_SpecSheet.pdf