Overview of VxRail Appliance 7.x System

In the digital economy, most applications need to provide a 24*7 Service-Level Agreement (SLA) for every customer. The IT service department provider often faces the problems of how to make applications available at any time, how to handle Life Cycle Management (LCM), how the system infrastructure can automatically scale up and out, and so on. Most traditional infrastructure architecture has some hardware and software limitations; it cannot fulfill these requirements. You may need to integrate third-party hardware and software to fulfill these requirements. However, this will increase the cost of the total solution. When new software packages or patches are released, they need to upgrade or apply the patch to the existing traditional infrastructure architecture. At this moment, some compatibility problems between the hardware and software may exist, which is why traditional infrastructure architecture is not a good solution.

With the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) platforms available on the market, most technical limitations of traditional infrastructure architecture can be resolved. The HCI platform can simplify most day-one deployment and day-two management activities. Dell VxRail Appliance is an HCI platform developed by Dell EMC and VMware. VxRail Appliance can provide different features, for example, hardware scaling, software package upgrade, centralized management, and LCM. In this chapter, we will discuss the VxRail system; you will get an overview of the VxRail Appliance 7.x platform.

This chapter includes the following main topics:

• What is VxRail Appliance?
• Dell VxRail architecture
• Dell VxRail features
• Dell VxRail management
• Dell VxRail documentation and resources