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 with VMware SRM

When enabling the DR features on the VxRail cluster, you can choose from VR, SRM, or Dell EMC RP4VMs, or from third-party data protection solutions. Since VxRail is developed by Dell and VMware, most VMware solutions are fully integrated with VxRail. Figure 8.7 shows a logical diagram of VxRail with VMware SRM. There are two sites: protected and recovery. This solution includes four main components per site—that is, VxRail Cluster, vCenter Server Appliance, SRM Server, and Site Recovery Adapter:

Figure 8.7 – A logical diagram of VxRail with VMware SRM

Based on your RTO and RTP requirements, you can choose VM replication with SRM or storage-based replication with SRM for the DR solution. HQ VxRail Cluster and DR VxRail Cluster can be the same or different series of VxRail systems. For example, an HQ VxRail cluster is created with four VxRail P670 nodes, and a DR VxRail cluster is created with four VxRail E660...