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 vSAN objects and components

When you create VMs in a VxRail cluster, you must specify the vSAN storage policy (we will discuss the details in the next section) for each VM. It will automatically create each object’s vSAN component (that is, the VMDK) and allocate it to each VxRail node when you apply the vSAN storage policy to the VM. vSAN manages and stores data called objects. Each object on the vSAN datastore includes data, metadata, and a unique ID. The most common vSAN objects are the VDMKs. In traditional storage, you need to define the storage pools, the RAID level protection, and the hot spare. Then, you can create VMs or build your application into this storage. All storage configurations must be completed on day one. The vSAN architecture is different from traditional storage. vSAN objects are made of components determined by vSAN storage policies. You can change or update the Failure Tolerance Method (FTM) and Failures To Tolerate (FTT) of the VM at...