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 S-Series

This section will discuss the disk group design for VxRail V-Series. Figure 5.18 shows the front view of VxRail S670. There are 16 disk slots on VxRail S670; disk slots 0 to 11 (front view) are used for the capacity tiers, and disk slots 0 to 3 (rear view) are used for the cache tier. VxRail S-Series only supports a hybrid configuration. The capacity disks only support 3.5” SAS/SATA, and the cache disks only support 2.5” SSD or NVMe:

Figure 5.18 – The first option of disk groups configuration in VxRail S670

In the release of VxRail 7.0.201 and later, VxRail S670 supports two options of disk groups:

  • Option 1: The two vSAN disk groups, which contain one cache disk and up to six capacity disks per disk group. Table 5.9 shows a four-disk-groups configuration for each disk slot in VxRail S670:

    Disk Groups

    Cache Tier

    Capacity Tier

    Disk Group 1

    Slot 2 (rear view)

    Slots 0 to 5 (front view)

    Disk Group 2

    Slot...