What this book covers

Chapter 1, Overview of VxRail HCI, discusses the VxRail system; you will get an overview of the VxRail HCI platform.

Chapter 2, VxRail Installation, describes the installation of the VxRail Appliance. You will learn how to plan and design the VxRail Appliance pre-deployment and post-deployment activities. This includes preparation of the pre-installation site checklist, hardware and software installation, network environment validation, and VxRail initialization and configuration.

Chapter 3, VxRail Administration Overview, describes an overview of VxRail administration. We will learn about the management panel that is used in VxRail appliances. Since the VxRail platform runs on VMware virtual SAN (vSAN), we will explain the vSAN architecture and its concepts.

Chapter 4, VxRail Management Overview, describes an overview of VxRail management. We will learn about the functions of the VxRail Manager Plugin for vCenter. We will become familiar with how to monitor the status of VxRail appliances with the VxRail Manager Plugin for vCenter.

Chapter 5, Managing VMware vSAN, describes an overview of VMware vSAN configuration and operation in a VxRail cluster. This includes different vSAN services, the management of vSAN storage policies, the monitoring of vSAN objects in a VxRail cluster, and vSAN availability.

Chapter 6, VxRail Upgrade, provides an overview of VxRail drive expansion and software upgrade procedures. We can easily upgrade the vSAN capacity in our VxRail cluster based on the disk group configuration rules.

Chapter 7, VxRail Scale-Out Operations, covers the process of adding a node to your VxRail cluster. The cluster expansion is performed with the VxRail Manager Plugin in VMware vCenter Server.

Chapter 8, Active-Passive Solution for VxRail, covers what the disaster recovery solutions for VxRail are. This includes a solution with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and vSphere Replication (VR).

Chapter 9, Active-Active Solution for VxRail, covers what a vSAN stretched cluster on VxRail is. This includes the active-active-passive solution with VMware SRM. We will learn how to plan and design this solution in this chapter.

Chapter 10, Migrating Virtual Machines into VxRail, covers how to migrate virtual machines into VxRail appliances from the vSphere environment, including different migration methodologies based on various scenarios.