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

Design of vCenter Server

In the previous chapter, you learned about the new features and hardware in the 15th-generation VxRail, including VxRail cluster types, vSAN dynamic nodes, and VxRail satellite nodes. When you plan to deploy the VxRail system in your environment, you can choose different kinds of VxRail deployments. You learned the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of VxRail node and what use case is suitable for each VxRail node.

VMware vCenter Server is an essential component of the VxRail system. VxRail Manager is integrated into VMware vCenter Server with the VxRail Manager plugin for vCenter. In the 14th-generation VxRail, you can choose the internal VMware vCenter Server (embedded vCenter Server) and external VMware vCenter Server (customer-supplied vCenter Server) for VxRail deployment in the Dell EMC VxRail deployment wizard. VxRail deployment depends on the design of the VxRail cluster configured with VMware vCenter Server, the Domain Name Server (DNS),...