Understanding hyperconverged infrastructure

Hyperconvergence is an approach to IT infrastructure that consolidates compute, storage and networking resources into a unified system. A hyperconverged infrastructure consists of compute resources (virtual machines) managed with a hypervisor, software-defined storage, and software-defined networking. Hyperconvergence of virtualized resources allows you to manage your resources from a single, unified interface.

With software-defined compute and storage integrated together, you can reduce data center complexity and footprint and support more modern workloads with flexible architectures on industry-standard hardware.

The software-defined-everything approach of hyperconvergence calls for virtualizing storage infrastructure. Unlike traditional network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) systems, software-defined storage is designed to perform on any x86 system, removing the software’s dependence on proprietary hardware. This approach creates a software layer between the physical storage and the data request—allowing you to manipulate how and where data is stored.

Like storage, software-defined networking (SDN) virtualizes networking functions in a hyperconverged infrastructure. SDN allows an IT operations team to control network traffic in complex networking topologies through a centralized panel instead of handling each network device manually.

Hyperconverged infrastructures use a hypervisor, like KVM, to manage the virtualized resources of the infrastructure. A hypervisor, sometimes called a virtual machine monitor (VMM), isolates the hypervisor operating system and resources from the virtual machines and enables the creation and management of those virtual machines.