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

Overview of VxRail scale-out rules

When you deploy a VxRail cluster, the first three nodes need to be identical models—for example, a VxRail cluster with three E660 nodes. If the hardware resources (for example, memory, storage capacity, network uplinks, and so on) are not enough for the virtual machines (VMs) running in the VxRail cluster, you can scale up or scale out the VxRail cluster. If you scale out the VxRail cluster, you need to consider the following VxRail scale-out rules:

  • All nodes in a VxRail cluster must run the same version of VxRail software—for example, VxRail Manager, VMware vSphere, hardware, firmware, Ethernet driver, or host bus adapter (HBA) driver. VxRail appliances have a lot more components, and all of them should/would be identical.
  • All-Flash or Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) nodes cannot be mixed in a VxRail hybrid cluster.
  • All VxRail G-Series nodes must be identical in their configuration in a chassis.
  • 10 GB and 1 GB...