{"id":13542,"date":"2021-09-02T16:56:46","date_gmt":"2021-09-02T21:56:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sterling.com\/?p=13542"},"modified":"2021-09-02T16:56:46","modified_gmt":"2021-09-02T21:56:46","slug":"extending-your-data-center-during-a-chip-shortage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sterling.com\/stargazer\/?p=13542","title":{"rendered":"Extending Your Data Center during a Chip Shortage"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sterling Cloud Architects Nathan Bennett and Billy Downing<\/em><\/p>\n

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Whispers and concerns about a chip shortage had already begun back in early 2020, when COVID first hit. With offices shut down and the workforce working remotely, people were updating their older computer systems to newer ones and purchasing home-office accessories like webcams and microphones and maybe that special ring lamp that makes you look so much better than your standard home-office lighting does.<\/p>\n

How did the buying binge affect the computer\/IT world? By rocketing computer sales up sky-high, to a 20% growth. Sure, that doesn’t sound so high, until you realize that Chromebooks, which are measured separately, had a jump in sales of 200%. <\/em><\/p>\n

We live in a time when semiconductors are everywhere<\/em>. Inside lightbulbs, locks in doors, the power steering in your car. Not only in modern technologies but inside old-school technologies: 12-inch touchscreens in your car, Wi-Fi in your fridge. Everywhere.<\/em><\/p>\n

Factories have doubled their production of semiconductors, and still there are shortages. And we need more “smart devices” (otherwise known as the “Internet of Things”) to keep the other smart things operating.<\/p>\n

So what?<\/em> This doesn’t really affect you<\/em>, does it? Let’s look at this observational example: You\u2019re driving along and see that the car dealership, once stocked full of automobiles, now has numerous empty spots. We\u2019ve never heard of a Ford dealership with fewer than 20 F-150s on the lot. That may sound like a lot of trucks, but when you realize that the F-150 is the most purchased automobile in the nation, you would be correct to think it strange. If you\u2019ve ever worked as a car salesman, you know there is a back lot full of cars that can be deployed to the front when needed. Except that now (you probably know where this is going) \u2014 that lot in the back is empty too.<\/p>\n

Now we are seeing this in the computer world. GPU chips are highly contested \u2014 because the conductors used for the PlayStation 5 are also in the Xbox Series X, MacBook, etc. Some dealers have a waitlist of over six months — just to fill laptop orders.<\/p>\n

With all the shortages happening, servers are next. If you can’t expand your on-premises environment, what will you do?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a solution: within the hybrid cloud. This is something like VMC on AWS, AVS in Azure, or GVE in Google. This allows you infrastructure within the public cloud that extends your networking into the public cloud and allows you to duplicate your subnets, thus simplifying the solution expansion. So, you are leveraging the chips that are already there<\/em>, using them to expand your on-premises data center.<\/p>\n

In the following scenario, we\u2019ll look at extending our existing on-premises data center, an SDDC, by using vCenter Cloud Gateway for single pane of management and HCX for layer 2 extensions to provide seamless migrations across environments.<\/p>\n

From the perspective of our VMC console, the topology is reflected in Figure 1<\/em> and Figure 2<\/em>, displaying our SDDC resources and network layout for internet connections, and a layer 3 policy-based VPN connecting our on-premises to the cloud environment.<\/p>\n

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Figure 1\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Figure <\/em>2<\/p>\n

Tools Used to Manage and Migrate<\/strong><\/p>\n

For a single pane of management between our on-prem and cloud workloads, we\u2019ve deployed the vCenter Cloud Gateway to establish a hybrid linked mode between both vCenters, giving us the ability to visualize, consolidate alarms, deploy templates, etc. between environments, as shown in Figure 3,<\/em> where Master vCenter is our on-prem, and vCenter is our cloud deployment.<\/p>\n

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Figure 3<\/em><\/p>\n

Highlighted within the blue box are a few workloads associated with each environment. Here our goal is to be able to seamlessly transition workloads across clouds without taking an outage. To accomplish this, VMware HCX is deployed to establish layer-2 extensibility across environments to allow vMotion-based migrations while maintaining IP-addressing and DNS resolutions. Figure 4<\/em> displays the connection status of our two environments, while Figure 5<\/em> details the service mesh and associated services used.<\/p>\n

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F<\/em>igure 4<\/em><\/p>\n

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Figure <\/em>5<\/p>\n

Within our HCX service mesh we can see several capabilities; however, in this use-case we\u2019ll focus on layer-2 extensions. In this environment, two port-groups are extended from our on-premises environment: BD-PortGroup21 and NB-Port-Group43 (Figure 6<\/em>). Our goal here is to migrate the virtual machine tiny-move-6 from our cloud environment to our on-premises environment without taking an outage using vMotion through HCX. Looking back at Figure 3<\/em>, We can confirm the current location of tiny-move-6 in the VMC environment from our single pane of glass management across the hybrid cloud.<\/p>\n

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Figure <\/em>6<\/p>\n

Seamless Workload Migration from Cloud to On-Prem<\/strong>ises<\/p>\n

Now that the stage is set, let\u2019s recap our goals and business values, then jump into moving workloads around.<\/p>\n