Book Image

Dell VxRail System Design and Best Practices

By : Victor Wu
Book Image

Dell VxRail System Design and Best Practices

By: Victor Wu

Overview of this book

Virtualized systems are well established now, and their disparate components can be found bundled together in hyper-converged infrastructures, such as VxRail from Dell EMC. Dell VxRail System Design and Best Practices will take you, as a system architect or administrator, through the process of designing and protecting VxRail systems. While this book assumes a certain level of knowledge of VMware, vSphere 7.x, and vCenter Server, you’ll get a thorough overview of VxRail's components, features, and architecture, as well as a breakdown of the benefits of this hyper-converged system. This guide will give you an in-depth understanding of VxRail, as well as plenty of practical examples and self-assessment questions along the way to help you plan and design every core component of a VxRail system – from vSAN storage policies to cluster expansion. It's no good having a great system if you lose everything when it breaks, so you'll spend some time examining advanced recovery options, such as VMware Site Recovery Manager and Veeam Backup and Replication. By the end of this book, you will have got to grips with Dell’s hyper-converged VxRail offering, taking your virtualization proficiency to the next level.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with the VxRail Appliance 7.x System
4
Part 2: Design of the VxRail Appliance 7.x System
9
Part 3: Design of Data Protection for the VxRail System

Overview of VxRail Stretched Cluster

VxRail Stretched Cluster is designed for an active-active data center solution, and it can provide redundancy and failure protection across two separate physical sites. In Figure 7.1, VxRail Stretched Cluster is built between two individual sites, including two data sites (Preferred Site and Secondary Site) and one witness site. The witness host deploys a third site that contains the witness components of the VM objects. The VMs can continue to provide the services when one of the data sites fails. This is the main feature of VxRail Stretched Cluster:

Figure 7.1 – VxRail Stretched Cluster with eight nodes

If you choose the deployment of VxRail Stretched Cluster, you need to consider the following:

  • The minimum supported configuration for VxRail Stretched Cluster is 1+1+1 (two VxRail nodes plus one witness). The maximum supported configuration is 15+15+1 (30 VxRail nodes plus 1 witness).
  • VxRail Stretched...