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

Design of VxRail Stretched Cluster

When you design VxRail Stretched Cluster, network infrastructure is an important factor for its deployment. This section will discuss WTS, which is an optional network configuration. We will discuss VxRail Stretched Cluster with and without WTS. This feature provides a flexible network configuration by separating the network of data nodes into data nodes and then data nodes to witness traffic. All operational tasks of VxRail Stretched Cluster are delivered with a vCenter Server instance; it supports two deployment options. The following sections will discuss the design of WTS and the VMware vCenter Server deployment options.

VxRail Stretched Cluster without WTS

Figure 7.8 shows a standard VxRail Stretched Cluster configuration without WTS. There are four data nodes installed in the preferred and secondary sites. The data nodes are connected through Stretched Layer 2 vSAN Network across the preferred and secondary sites. The vSAN communication...