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 VBR

In previous chapters of this book, we mentioned that VxRail bundles some data protection software, such as VMware vSphere Replication, vSAN stretched clusters, and Dell EMC RP4VMs. If you do not use these data protection features on a VxRail cluster, you can use third-party data backup and recovery software—for example, VBR. Figure 10.11 shows a sample architecture of VxRail with VBR:

Figure 10.11 – A sample architecture of VxRail with VBR

In the configuration shown in Figure 10.11, there are four Veeam components—the VBR server, the VBR console, the backup proxy server, and the backup repository one VxRail cluster with four nodes, and one embedded vCenter Server instance. We can create a backup job to protect the VMs on the VxRail cluster with the VBR server. All backup images of VMs will be stored in the backup repository. In this scenario, the backup proxy server is a virtual host that can be deployed into...