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 V-Series

Figure 5.14 shows the front view of VxRail V670F. There are 24 disk slots on VxRail V670F; disk slots 0 to 19 are used for the capacity tiers, and disk slots 20 to 23 are used for the cache tier. The capacity disks support SAS/SATA/SSD, and the cache disks support SSD and NVMe SSD:

Figure 5.14 – Front view of VxRail V670F

In the release of VxRail 7.0.201 and later, VxRail V670F supports two options of disk groups:

  • Option 1: Four vSAN disk groups, which contain one cache disk and up to five capacity disks per disk group. Table 5.7 shows a four-disk-group configuration for each disk slot in VxRail V670F:

    Disk Groups

    Cache Tier

    Capacity Tier

    Disk Group 1

    Slot 20

    Slots 0 to 4

    Disk Group 2

    Slot 21

    Slots 5 to 9

    Disk Group 3

    Slot 22

    Slots 10 to 14

    Disk Group 4

    Slot 23

    Slots 15 to 19

Table 5.7 – The first option of disk groups configuration in VxRail V670F

  • Option 2: In Figure 5.15, the three vSAN disk groups...