HPE EZMERAL CONTAINER PLATFORM 5.3 AND HPE EZMERAL DATA FABRIC ON DL SERVERS

# Solution Overview

This solution is built by deploying the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform on HPE ProLiant DL325 and DL385 Gen 10 Plus Servers with multiple local disks setup for Ephermeral and persistent storage. HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric for Kubernetes provides persistent storage for this solution.

Figure 2: HPE Ezmeral software portfolio overview

# HPE Ezmeral Container Platform 5.3

The HPE Ezmeral Container Platform is a unified container platform built and designed for both cloud-native applications and stateful analytics applications. They can run on any infrastructure either on-premises, in public clouds, in a hybrid model, or at the edge.

HPE Ezmeral Container Platform installs as a software layer between the underlying server infrastructure and the Big Data distribution, AI/ML libraries, and applications. The use of Docker is completely transparent and HPE Ezmeral Container Platform customers benefit from greater agility and bare metal performance due to the lightweight nature of containers. They can leverage the flexibility of containers to simplify the development of DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and application modernization across hybrid cloud deployments.

The HPE Ezmeral portfolio allows you to:

  • Run containers and Kubernetes at scale to modernize apps, from edge to cloud

  • Manage your apps, data, and ops – leveraging AI and analytics for faster time-to-insights

  • Ensure control for governance, compliance, and lower costs

  • Provide enterprise-grade security and authentication to reduce risk

    Figure 3 shows the high-level HPE Ezmeral Container Platform architecture.

Figure 3: HPE Ezmeral Container Platform architecture

HPE Ezmeral Container Platform 5.3 includes the following new features

Figure 4: HPE Ezmeral Container Platform 5.3 What's New

  • GPU Support & GPU Metrics: HPE Ezmeral Container Platform 5.3 adds GPU support for Kubernetes hosts running SLES. Beginning with HPE Ezmeral Container Platform 5.3, Dashboard views show additional GPU information for Kubernetes clusters and also shows new graphs for GPU use and GPU memory utilization.
  • Integrated Container Runtime Security: Ezmeral Container Platform now includes out-of-the-box "Threat detection and alerting" for running containers powered by open source Falco. Ezmeral Container Platform provides default Falco rules for threat detection.
  • Centralized Policy Management for Kubernetes clusters: The Centralized Policy Management feature is the fine-grained control of objects in your Kubernetes cluster, in which you express policies as YAML files (Kubernetes manifests), and apply them on the Kubernetes cluster.
  • HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric on Kubernetes enhancements: Beginning with HPE Ezmeral Container Platform 5.3, the HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric on Kubernetes functions are collectively identified with a version number. HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric on Kubernetes 1.4 functions align with bare-metal HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric version 6.2.
  • New ML Ops Features: This includes support for Apache Airflow, Spark machine-learning workflow, streamlined the registry specifications for air-gap environments and many more.
  • Support for two implementations of Istio: HPE Ezmeral Container Platform version 5.3 includes two implementations of Istio Standalone & Istio Kubeflow 1.2.

# HPE Ezmeral Container Platform Controller

HPE Ezmetal Container Platform Controller is installed and configured on 3x HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Plus Servers with multiple local disks setup as raid for platform-level high availability functionality that protects HPE Ezmeral Container Platform against the failure of the Controller host. Platform-level high availability requires two designated Ezmeral worker hosts, such as Shadow Controller and Arbiter.

# HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric for Kubernetes Cluster

Consists of a bare metal Kubernetes cluster built on top of 3x HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Plus Server Compute Module as master nodes and 5x HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus Server as workers where the HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric is created. The deployment of Kubernetes clusters is achieved using the proven HPE Ezmeral Container Platform software.

# Persistent Storage

Persistent volume for the cluster is available from the native HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric for Kubernetes

# Gateway load balancer

Gateway is important role as it provides a connection to HPE Ezmeral Container Platform- managed Kubernetes cluster services. All public service endpoints in KubeDirector- managed Kubernetes clusters will be exposed via HPE Ezmeral Container Platform Gateway re-mapped ports. Redundancy for Gateway hosts is provided by creating two sets of gateway servers. This is done by mapping multiple Gateway host IP addresses to a single hostname. This ensures that there is no single point of failure for the Gateway host. When this is done, either the DNS server or an external load balancer will load-balance requests to the hostname among all the Gateway hosts on a round-robin, least connection, etc. basis.

NOTE

HPE Ezmeral Container Platform Gateway load balancer (LB) nodes are deployed on physical machine.

# HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric for Kubernetes

The HPE Ezmeral Container Platform by default will install and configure the persistent data fabric for AI and analytics and K8s workload. This data fabric is a distributed file and object store that manages both structured and unstructured data. It is designed to store data at an Exabyte scale, support trillions of files, and combine analytics and operations into a single platform. It supports industry-standard protocols and APIs, including POSIX, NFS, S3, and HDFS. With production-ready capabilities like policy-based data tiering, consistent snapshots, and mirroring, the persistent data fabric serves as the enterprise standard for meeting stringent storage and processing SLAs across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and edge deployment.

Figure 5 describes the minimal configuration of HPE Ezmeral Container Platform deployment on HPE ProLiant DL Gen10 Plus Servers.

Figure 5: HPE Ezmeral Container Platform solution layout on HPE ProLiant DL Gen10 Plus Servers

All applications running in containers will be able to natively access data across the fabric through DataTaps as well as through FSMount. K8s persistent volumes will be seamlessly available across clusters from this persistent data fabric.

In this solution, HPE Ezmeral Container Platform Controllers, Gateway load balancers, Kubernetes master nodes and Kubernetes worker nodes are deployed on HPE ProLiant DL325 & DL385 Gen10 Plus Servers running SUSE Enterprise Linux 15 SP2.

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