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Architecture Requirements to Deploy Silk

About Silk 

Silk offers the flexibility and high performance that organizations need to leverage the public cloud. The Silk Data Virtualization Platform is a combination of tested and packaged software and services. Silk provides a rich set of data services, machine learning, analytics, and policy-based automation and orchestration. 

Use this guide to learn about the prerequisites to successfully deploy Silk onto your instance of Microsoft Azure. 

Refer to the following guides for more information about the prerequisites, steps involved, architecture, security, and networking requirements to successfully deploy Silk onto your instance of Microsoft Azure. 

  1. Deploying Silk – Overview & Background 
  2. How to Deploy Silk 
  3. Architecture Requirements to Deploy Silk 
  4. Security Requirements to Deploy Silk 
  5. Networking Requirements to Deploy Silk

 

Architecture: Determine Desired Silk Deployment Design 

Customers can support a variety of environment design considerations using Silk. When preparing for a deployment, Silk customers should consider factors such as: 

  • Which region(s) and zone(s) need Silk Data Pods (SDP)? 
  • Are there multiple environments that would benefit from using Silk? For example, Production, Non- Prod, Dev/Test, QA, etc. 
  • Is a High-Availability setup desired? 
  • Where would synchronous and/or asynchronous replication benefit the availability and disaster recovery design of the environment? 

Some of these concepts are shown in the example in Figure 1. 

Figure 1: An example Silk deployment. On the left is shown a Primary SDP and Secondary SDP in two zones of Region A with application-level synchronous replication. On the right is shown a DR (Disaster Recovery) SDP in a separate region, Region B, with Silk-level asynchronous replication.

 

Architecture: Determine the Cluster Size for each Silk Flex Instance 

The cluster size depends on your anticipated cloud storage capacity (Table 1). It is important to match the cluster size to your potential cloud usage needs. 

Table 1 below breaks down the cluster size – small, medium, or large – and resources required for Microsoft Azure. 

Table 1: Cluster size and resources required for Microsoft Azure. 

Azure
Cluster Size  Max Resources  Can hold up to  Address space range 
Small cluster  3 m.nodes, 9 c.nodes  2 SDPs  /24 
Medium cluster  6 m.nodes, 23 c.nodes  4 SDPs  /23 
Large cluster  25 m.nodes, 99 c.nodes  24 SDPs  /21 

 

Network (Azure) 
Cluster Size  Subnet Name  Example  Address Space  Total Host 
Small Cluster Data ports 1  10.0.0.128  /28  16 
Data ports 2  10.0.0.144  /28  16 
Internal 1 subnet  10.0.0.0  /26  64 
Internal 2 subnet  10.0.0.64  /26  64 
External management  10.0.0.160  /28  16 
Cluster Size  Subnet Name  Example  Address Space  Total Host 
Medium Cluster Data ports 1  10.0.1.0  /27  32 
Data ports 2  10.0.1.32  /27  32 
Internal 1 subnet  10.0.0.0  /25  128 
Internal 2 subnet  10.0.0.128  /25  128 
External management  10.0.1.64  /27  32 
Cluster Size  Subnet Name  Example  Address Space  Total Host 
Large Cluster Data ports 1  10.0.4.0  /25  128 
Data ports 2  10.0.4.128  /25  128 
Internal 1 subnet  10.0.0.0  /23  512 
Internal 2 subnet  10.0.2.0  /23  512 
External management  10.0.5.0  /25  128 

For each Silk Flex instance, you will need to decide on the cluster size by doing the following: 

  1. Determine the number of desired Silk Data Pods (SDPs). 
  2. Determine the SDP configuration for each SDP:
    1. Determine the number of c.nodes: between 2 and 8.
    2. Determine the number of m.nodes by using Table 2 below:
Feature  Silk on VMs  Silk on Pv2 
Number of m.nodes  1 to 4  1 to 3 
m.node sizes  19.38 TiB 

39.1 TiB 

78.59 TiB 

 5 TiB 

10 TiB 

20 TiB 

40 TiB 

80 TiB 

Note: VM = Virtual Machine. Pv2 = Azure Premium SSD Version 2 

  1. Optional: Select checkpointing. 
  2. Note: Checkpointing is ON by default for Silk on Pv2. 
  3. Optional: Add a public IP address. 
  4. Based on the SDP count and configurations, determine if a small, medium, or large Silk Flex cluster is required.

 

Architecture: Deploy the Silk Flex Instance from the Azure Marketplace 

Assign Resource Groups 

For deploying the Silk Flex instance from Azure Marketplace, Silk can create a new resource group during the onboarding process. 

Alternatively, Silk can use an existing resource group that is empty. 

Note: If using an existing resource group, the group must be empty. 

Information Required to Deploy Silk Flex 

You will use the following information during the process of deploying a Silk Flex instance from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace: 

  1. Customer project information:
    1. Subscription ID 
    2. Subscription Name 
    3. Resource Group Name 
    4. Region 
    5. Availability Zone (if the region has availability zones)
      1. Note: If no availability zone is specified, Silk Flex deploys to Zone1 by default. 
  2. Networking information:
    1. VNET name (Refer to Architecture: Configure VNETs for more information)
      1. Note: Silk can create a new VNET for you or can use an existing VNET to deploy Silk Flex. 
    2. Silk Flex Subnet Name 
    3. CIDR summary for the flex subnet (/28) 
  3. Deployment name. 
  4. The name for the virtual machine (VM) hosting Silk Flex. 
  5. The username and password for the VM hosting Silk Flex. a.
    1. Note: This is different from the login for the Silk Flex UI. 
  6. The username and password for the Silk Flex UI.

 

Architecture: Deploy the Silk Flex Cluster 

Silk requires the following information to deploy a Silk Flex Cluster: 

  1. The Cluster Configuration file from Silk
    1. Note: Silk will provide this file for you after you complete the Silk Checklist. 
  2. The cluster IP information
    1. Note: The network requirements depend on the Silk Flex Cluster size as shown in Table 3 below: 

Table 3: Network requirements based on cluster size.

Cluster Size  Subnet Allocation  Number of addresses 
Small Cluster  / 24  256 
Medium Cluster  / 23  512 
Large Cluster  / 21  2048 
  1. VNET information
    1. VNET Name 
    2. VNET Resource Group Name 
  2. SMTP relay information
    1. SMTP Server Name or IP Address 
    2. SMTP Port Number 
  3. Determine management access:
    1. User Access via VPN, Jump Box, Bastien Host, or other customer preference. 
    2. Flex management access 
    3. SDP management access (for once an SDP is deployed) 
    4. Internet 

If you require Mail Server authentication, please also provide the following information: 

  1. Security (TLS, SSL, None) 
  2. Username 
  3. Password (you can share separately) 

 

Architecture: Silk c.node and d.node Image Copy Process 

Silk requires the following information for the Silk c.node and d.node image copy process: 

  1. Latest image files of the c.node and d.node.
    1. Note: Silk will provide the latest image files. 
  2. IAM roles required for deployment.

 

Architecture: Quotas 

Follow the steps below to confirm the quota required to deploy Silk from the Azure marketplace. 

  1. Confirm quota for four standard DSv3 family vCPUs per Flex instance.
    1. Note: The quotas for Azure components depend on the number and configuration of the Silk Data Pods (i.e., number of c.nodes and m.nodes), which in turn determines the size of the Silk Flex instance. 
    2. Note: Silk Flex requires a quota of 4 vCPUs (one D4s_v3 VM with 4 vCPUs) per Silk Flex instance, regardless of cluster size. 
  2. Confirm overall quota for virtual machines (VM). 
  3. For deploying Silk Data Pods from Silk Flex:
    1. Confirm quota for Standard DSv5 Family vCPUs based on the number of c.nodes 
    2. Confirm quota for m.nodes / d.nodes
      1. If using L-series VMs for d.nodes, confirm quota for Lsv3 or Lasv3 vCPUs is sufficient. 
      2. If using Premium v2 SSDs for d.nodes, confirm Pv2 total disk size in GB quota is sufficient (Pv2 = Azure Premium SSD Version 2), using Table 4 below for guidance: 

Table 4: Capacity required from Azure based on m.node size.

m.node Size  Pv2 Capacity Required from Azure (in GiB)  Pv2 Capacity Required from Azure (in GB) 
5 TiB m.node  9,855 GiB  10,582 GB 
10 TiB m.node  17,280 GiB  18,555 GB 
20 TiB m.node  33,480 GiB  35,950 GB 
40 TiB m.node  66,420 GiB  71,320 GB 
80 TiB m.node  132,210 GiB  141,960 GB 

 

Architecture: Configure VNETs 

There are certain considerations to keep in mind regarding VNETs when deploying Silk and when creating the Silk Flex cluster. 

VNET Configuration to Create the Silk Flex Cluster 

You can use an existing VNET to create the Silk Flex cluster. To use an existing VNET, you will need to provide the following information: 

  1. VNET Name 
  2. VNET Resource Group Name 

We will also require a custom role to allow changes to the target VNET (see the IAM Roles & Permissions section of the Security Requirements document) 

Alternatively, you can create a new VNET during the Silk Flex creation process. To create a new VNET, you will need to determine the following: 

  1. The name for the new VNET 
  2. The Resource Group it will be assigned to 

Host VNET Configuration 

You can deploy the database Instances that will connect to Silk within the same VNET as the Silk Data Pod(s) or in a separate VNET. If deployed in a separate VNET, the Database/Application Host VNET must be peered to the SDP VNET.

 

Architecture: Resource Types 

The following is a list of all deployed resource types. Please check this against any Azure deployment policy restrictions. Refer to the guide Security Requirements to Deploy Silk, Section Security: Azure Policies for additional information. 

  1. Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts 
  2. Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses (Optional) 
  3. Microsoft.Compute/availabilitySets 
  4. Microsoft.Compute/proximityPlacementGroups 
  5. Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines 
  6. Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces 
  7. Microsoft.Compute/disks 
  8. Microsoft.Resources/deployments