Book Image

Implementing VxRail HCI Solutions

Book Image

Implementing VxRail HCI Solutions

Overview of this book

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) can help you simplify the provisioning and daily operations of computing and storage. With this book, you'll understand how HCI can offload the day 0 deployment and day-to-day operations of a system administrator. You'll explore the VxRail Appliance, which is an HCI solution that provides lifecycle management, automation, and operational simplicity. Starting with an overview of the VxRail Appliance system architecture and components, you'll understand the benefits of the VxRail system and compare it with the environment of traditional servers and storage. As you advance, the book covers topics such as disaster recovery and active-active and active-passive solutions for VxRail. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the confidence to manage the deployment, administration, planning, and design of a VxRail system.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with VxRail HCI System
4
Section 2: Administration of VxRail
10
Section 3: Advanced Solutions for VxRail

Deploying the active-active solution for VxRail

In this section, we will discuss the deployment of an active-active solution for VxRail. This includes the deployment of a vSAN stretched cluster witness and the configuration of a VxRail vSAN stretched cluster. Let's assume that we are deploying a VxRail cluster (with eight E560 nodes) across the preferred site and the secondary site, and that a vSphere cluster is running at the witness site.

Deploying a vSAN stretched cluster witness

We will deploy a vSAN witness appliance in a vSphere cluster at the witness site. The following is the procedure for deploying the vSAN witness appliance:

  1. Go to the VMware website (https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/6_7#drivers_tools) and select the corresponding version on the Select Version menu. For VxRail version 4.7.x, select 6.7. We can download the latest version of the VMware Virtual SAN Witness Appliance 6.7U3j...