Pulsant Technical Specification Title Pulsant Government Virtual Server IL2 Department Cloud Services Contributors RR Classification Restricted Version 1.0 Overview Pulsant offer two products based on its Enterprise Cloud technology stack. Virtual Machine provides a simple virtual server orientated service providing servers that provide specifiable quantities of CPU time, RAM and storage. As the hardware platform is completely managed and totally abstracted from the consumer virtual machine resources are flexible and not tied to the physical server resources they represent. This allows a higher degree of flexibility that is impossible within a traditional environment. The platform itself is also fully resilient and provides resident virtual servers with fault tolerance it is complex and costly to provide in a physical environment. Pulsant 2014 Page 1 of 8
Logical Design Diagram Consumer View From the point of view of consumers or tenants the environments created within the Enterprise Cloud platform appear identical to those you would build out of physical equipment. Each customer has a series of virtual machines connected to virtual networks. Those virtual networks exist only inside the cloud platform and provide complete isolation between customers using the vcloud Network Isolation technology built into the hypervisor. Virtual networks are connected to external networks using either physical or virtual firewalls. In the case of connecting a physical firewall the customer network isolation is maintained into the physical world using VLANs. The customer perimeter firewall then connects the environment to external networks be those the internet or private external connectivity brought in for the customer. Core Network HA Firewalls HA Switches vcloud Director Web Portal Customer 1 Customer 2 Customer 3 Customer 4 Cluster 1 Resource Cluster Cluster 2 Resource Cluster Full System View The Enterprise Cloud platforms viewed as a whole operate as multiple VMware vcenter based clusters of VMware vsphere hypervisors co-ordinated by a central VMware vcloud Director orchestration instance. Front end networks i.e. those inhabited by tenants and connecting to external networks are isolated from those back end networks that control the clusters and their resources. Pulsant use a security zoned, physically separate management network over which the clusters can communicate between each other and the central controller. Each cluster connects to Pulsant 2014 Page 2 of 8
storage via fibre channel SAN. The hypervisor controls access to storage volumes which are completely isolated from any customer connectivity through several layers of abstraction and hypervisor security. Core Network HA Firewalls HA Switches VMware dvswitch Cluster 1 Resource Cluster Host1 Host2 vcloud Director Management Cluster VMware dvswitch Cluster 2 Resource Cluster vmknic vmknic vmknic vmknic vmknic vmknic Pulsant Management Bus Inter-site Routing Pulsant Management Bus Pulsant Storage Fabric Pulsant Storage Fabric Pulsant Storage Systems Pulsant Storage Systems Pulsant 2014 Page 3 of 8
Physical Design Diagram Physically the Enterprise Cloud platform is built from high quality components throughout. The Pulsant core network is provided by Cisco ASR routers and 6500 switching for transit connectivity. The front-end of Enterprise Cloud clusters is connected directly to the core network allowing complete flexibility of connectivity down in to customer networks this is akin to being a top of rack switch providing customer connectivity into to an uplink to the network core. Server technology is provided by HP from their BladeSystem line with physical switching within the blade chassis provided by HP VirtualConnect 10Gbit switching. Back end management and storage networks are physically separate. The management networks are created from Cisco Catalyst switches with each zone (each service in each location is considered a zone. An enterprise cloud resource cluster is a single zone) protected by its own Cisco ASA firewall. Storage network is provided by HP and consists of 8GB FC connectivity. Storage is provided by HP also and consists of HP 3PAR storage systems from their F and 7000 families containing a mix of SSD, 15krpm SAS/FC and 7.2krpm ML-SAS/NL-FC drives using sub-lun auto-tiering for data optimisation. Pulsant 2014 Page 4 of 8
HP VirtualConnect Switch HP VirtualConnect Switch HP VirtualConnect Switch HP VirtualConnect Switch Pulsant Government Virtual Server IL2 Core Network HA Firewalls HA Switches Web Portal Only Host servers x16 Cluster 1 Blade Chassis 1 Host1 Host2 vcloud Director Management Cluster Host servers x16 Cluster 2 Blade Chassis 1 Host servers x16 Cluster 1 Blade Chassis 2 No customer access. Inter-site Routing Host servers x16 Cluster 2 Blade Chassis 2 Pulsant Management Bus FC Zoning, Fully managed. No customer configuration access Pulsant Storage Fabric Pulsant Storage Systems Pulsant Storage Systems Standard Builds Virtual Hardware Virtual hardware can be configured in any combination of resources units within some guidelines: Quantity of virtual CPUs 1, 2, 4 or 8 Virtual CPUs or vcpus provide a virtual server with access to the physical processor cores on which virtual machines run. Additional vcpus provide access to additional physical cores allowing for greater performance in multi-threaded applications running inside the virtual machine. Pulsant 2014 Page 5 of 8
Size of Virtual Machine RAM in GB: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 96, 128 Virtual machine RAM or vram is simply the size of the RAM the virtual server thinks it has. On the Pulsant Enterprise Cloud all vram is reserved for the holding virtual server. Nonreserved/guaranteed vram can lead to huge performance issues. Size of Storage in GB. Minimum 30GB per virtual machine. Virtual disks or vdisks appear to the virtual machine as physical disk drives. Subject to minimum sizes to accommodate the operating system in the virtual machine, vdisks can be sized to requirements. Multiple vdisks can be specified if required. Tier of Storage Base, Core or Performance. This affects the performance of the storage used. Base Provides low cost storage for archiving or basic file servers Core Provides a good balance of performance vs cost adequate for the vast majority of normal requirements Performance Provides high performance storage for use in demanding applications such as databases. Virtual machines within a single environment for a customer by default are provisioned with a single virtual network connecting the machines to each other and to an edge firewall. Software All virtual servers are available with the following operating systems: Microsoft Windows o 2008 R2 Standard Edition Enterprise Edition Datacenter Edition o 2012 Standard Edition Datacenter Edition o 2012 R2 Standard Edition Datacenter Edition Linux o o o o Redhat 6 (latest stable) CentOS 6 (latest stable) Debian 7 (latest stable) Ubuntu 13 (latest stable) Pulsant 2014 Page 6 of 8
Operating system installations are providing fully updated according to vendor recommendations and Pulsant s patch management and approval process. Standard installations include installation/configuration of the below: Hardware resiliency (where specified) o RAID configurations o Network interface card (NIC) teaming configuration Server networking o IP addressing o DNS o Local firewall Manageability o Remote Desktop or SSH access o SNMP community configuration Management Scope Access Virtual servers are provided by default with full administrator/root access for the customer allowing full configuration of the hardware and software if required. It is recommended that the customer follows best practise for issuing further access if such access is required and not configured by Pulsant. For Windows based servers the Remote Desktop administration method is enabled allowing users with appropriate credentials and access through firewalls to control the machine via the Windows Desktop on the local server. For Linux based machines SSH (Secure Shell) access is enabled allowing root level access to the operating system. Note: Linux systems are not provided with a graphical administration method by default. Support The extent of available support varies by deployment model. IaaS Infrastructure as a Service As an infrastructure only service the following are available via Pulsant s Managed Server team: Hardware Maintenance OS Installation PaaS Platform as a Service As a supported platform service the following are available via Pulsant s Managed Server team: Pulsant 2014 Page 7 of 8
Hardware maintenance OS installation Core services monitoring Supervised security patching OS configuration changes Pro-active management With the Application Support extended service: Extended services monitoring Application installation and on-going configuration Backup and Recovery The level of management of backup services is linked to the level of management of the services to be protected. As such, backup is available for both deployment models but only as a fully managed service for PaaS deployments. IaaS Deployments Pulsant will provide: An online backup storage allocation as specified against the size, change and retention requirements for the service The ability for the user to configure protection of their data The ability for the user to perform data restores PaaS Deployments Pulsant will provide: An online backup storage allocation as specified against the size, change and retention requirements for the service Full configuration of backup sets and schedules On-demand backup On-demand data recovery from the selected backup point The ability for the user to configure protected of their data The ability for the user to perform data restores Pulsant 2014 Page 8 of 8