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

An overview of VMware vSAN on VxRail

VMware vSAN is a Software-Defined Storage (SDS) solution that is used in collaboration with the VMware vSphere hypervisor. The VMware vSAN solution can provide shared storage for VMs. In Figure 4.1, vSAN is a vSphere cluster feature that virtualizes the local physical storage in the pool of the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and Solid-State Drive (SSD) on the ESXi hosts in a cluster, building them into a unified data store. Each ESXi host requires a minimum disk group that includes a SSD and HDD. vSAN can provide enterprise storage that is powerful, flexible, and user-friendly. This solution can be deployed in different environments – for example, the core, the edge, and the cloud. When you build the VxRail cluster on day one, the vSAN datastore is created automatically.

The vSAN datastore includes the following characteristics:

  • All nodes in the VxRail cluster must be connected to a vSAN Layer 2 or Layer 3 network. It supports a maximum...