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 P-Series

Figure 5.10 shows the front view of VxRail P670F. There are 28 disk slots; disk slots 0 to 19 and slots 24 to 27 are used for the capacity tiers, and disk slots 20 to 23 are used for the cache tier. The capacity disks support SAS/SSD, and the cache disks support SSD and NVMe SSD:

Figure 5.10 – Front view and rear view of VxRail P670F

Important Note

In Dell’s 15th-generation PowerEdge server, only three models of the All-Flash node exist in the VxRail P-Series; they are VxRail P670F, P675F, and P675N.

In the release of VxRail 7.0.201 and later, VxRail P670F supports two options of disk groups:

  • Option 1: The first configuration is of four vSAN disk groups, which contain one cache disk and up to five capacity disks per disk group. Table 5.4 shows a four-disk-groups configuration for each disk slot in VxRail E660/F/N:

    Disk Groups

    Cache Tier

    Capacity Tier

    Disk Group 1

    Slot 20

    Slots 0 to 4

    Disk Group 2...