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

VMware vSAN storage policies

The vSAN storage policy is used to define the VM storage requirements of performance and availability. After vSAN storage is applied to a VM, a number of vSAN component replicas and copies are created automatically based on the vSAN storage policy. vSAN supports the following RAID level protection. Table 4.1 includes a description of each supported RAID level on vSAN:

Table 4.1 – Descriptions of FTMs on the vSAN storage policies

When you create the vSAN storage policy based on your storage requirements for a VM and its VMDKs, you can define the different storage rules, including encryption services, space efficiency, and storage tiers.

In Figure 4.7, you can go to the Storage rules tab in the Create VM Storage Policy wizard if you want to enable storage rules on your vSAN storage policies. You can select the following storage rules:

  • Encryption services is used to define the encryption rules for the VM:
    • Data-At-Rest...