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

VxRail nodes with vSAN

The VxRail Standard Cluster is one type of VxRail cluster deployment; it requires a minimum of three nodes with the same model in the VxRail cluster, which all VxRail hardware models support. Each VxRail node includes cache disks (Flash or NVMe) and capacity disks for this cluster type. In Figure 2.2, there are four nodes in the VxRail cluster, and each node consists of a Disk Group with one cache disk and two capacity disks. It can automatically build the VxRail cluster and create a local vSAN datastore as primary storage after the deployment is complete.

Figure 2.2 – The diagram of VxRail nodes with vSAN

VxRail standard clusters also support connectivity with external storage, such as Dell EMC storage, HCI Mesh, or third-party storage. All VxRail nodes support adding one Fibre Channel HBA except the VxRail D and G Series. You can set up the connectivity of the VxRail cluster and secondary storage with Fibre Channel or iSCSI Channel...