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 RP4VM

Before we discuss the design of RP4VM, we will provide an overview of it. Figure 9.1 shows the RP4VM system architecture with the vSphere HTML5 plugin:

Figure 9.1 – RP4VM system architecture with the vSphere HTML5 plugin

RP4VM includes the following components:

  • VMware vCenter Server: This central management dashboard provides all operation tasks for RP4VM.
  • RecoverPoint for VMs cluster: Each RP4VM cluster consists of a minimum of one Virtual RecoverPoint Appliance (vRPA) and a maximum of eight vRPAs. This cluster is used to manage the data replication tasks.
  • Splitter: The RP4VM splitter is installed on each VMware ESXi host. It splits the write tasks coming from the ESXi host and sends them to the vRPA and the VM’s VM disk file (VMDK). The vRPA cluster handles all network traffic to journals and replicas.
  • RecoverPoint for VMs HTML5 plugin: This is the user interface to manage the RP4VM system. The RP4VM 5.3...