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 dynamic nodes

The VxRail dynamic node cluster is a type of VxRail cluster deployment that requires a minimum of two nodes with the same model in the VxRail cluster, supported by three VxRail hardware models, E660F, P670F, and V670F. These nodes are built on Dell PowerEdge 15th-generation servers. VxRail dynamic nodes do not include any storage resources and only consist of the compute resources. However, these nodes can also deliver all the benefits of the VxRail Appliance system, except the storage resources. If you choose this type of cluster deployment, you need to connect to an external storage array. The external storage supports various options, including Dell PowerStore, Dell PowerMax, and Dell Unity XT. In Figure 2.5, there is a VxRail dynamic node cluster with four nodes connected to an external storage array. In this type of cluster deployment, the connectivity of the VxRail dynamic node and external storage is in Fibre Channel (FC in the diagram).

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