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

Design of disk groups on VxRail E-Series

The cache and capacity disks are predefined in specific disk slots before the VxRail system is delivered to the customer from the Dell factory. The disk slot locations for cache and capacity are fixed when they are made in the Dell factory, and you cannot change them. Figure 5.5 shows the front view of VxRail E660, E660F, and E660N. There are 10 disk slots on these 3 types of VxRail E-Series; disk slots 0 to 7 are used for the capacity tier and disk slots 8 to 9 are used for the cache tier. The capacity disks support SAS/SATA/SSD, and the cache disks support SSD and NVMe SSD:

Figure 5.5 – Front view of VxRail E660/F/N

If you scale up the VxRail cluster, you need to consider the following VxRail scale-up rules:

  • Mixing the SAS/SATA/NVMe SSDs in the same disk group is not supported.
  • Mixing the capacity HDDs with capacity SSDs in the same disk group is not supported.
  • All the capacity disks must be...