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 vSAN two-node clusters

The VMware vSAN two-node cluster on VxRail is designed for remote offices, branch offices, and small-scale deployments. The VxRail vSAN two-node configuration is supported in VxRail E, P, V, D, and S Series. This solution includes two VxRail nodes and a witness virtual appliance, and it supports the two deployment options, that is, switch configuration and direct connection configuration. In Figure 6.1, there are two nodes (VxRail Node 1 and VxRail Node 2). There are four 10 GB ports on each node. The first and second ports (P1 and P2) are used for the management, witness, and virtual machine networks. The third and fourth ports (P3 and P4) are used for vSAN and vMotion networks. vCenter Server and vSAN Witness are hosted in the main data center:

Figure 6.1 – Sample architecture of a VxRail vSAN two-node cluster

The vSAN two-node cluster is created with two VxRail nodes and the vSAN Witness virtual appliance...