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

External vCenter Server with customer-supplied VDS

This section discusses a VxRail deployment with the external vCenter Server and a customer-supplied VDS and goes through a scenario for this VxRail deployment.

Overview

In Figure 3.7, you can see three VxRail clusters in this VMware environment: VxRail clusters A, B, and C. All clusters are managed with the external vCenter Server. The external vCenter Server can be a new vCenter Server instance or a vCenter Server instance in the existing VMware infrastructure environment. Starting from VxRail 7.0.010, a deployment option is available where a single customer-supplied VDS is created via the existing vCenter Server instance. If you choose this VxRail deployment, you can manage and monitor each VxRail cluster in a single management interface and the customer-supplied VDS spans across each VxRail cluster. VxRail Manager is installed on the VxRail cluster. Each VxRail node and all virtual machines (VxRail Manager and the other virtual...