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 HCI Mesh

VMware HCI Mesh was introduced with vSphere 7.0 Update 2 and allowed you to remotely connect to one or more VMware vSAN datastores from another vSAN cluster. In Figure 4.12, there are three VxRail clusters (one server and two clients). Two VxRail clusters (Client) are remotely connected to a vSAN datastore from the VxRail cluster (Server). vSAN HCI Mesh can be used for balancing storage resources by migrating VMs to other vSAN clusters using vSphere Storage vMotion.

Now, compute clusters can connect to the remote vSAN datastores. You can define the different storage tier vSAN storage policies (for example, RAID-1, RAID-5, deduplication, encryption, and All-Flash) and apply them to the different tier VMs in the vSAN cluster. HCI Mesh brings together multiple independent clusters for a native, cross-cluster architecture that disaggregates compute and storage resources and enables efficient utilization of storage capacity. HCI Mesh is used to share the storage...