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

Designing a VxRail vSAN two-node cluster

This section will discuss designing and planning a VxRail vSAN two-node cluster, including the networking and deployment type. VxRail vSAN two-node clusters support direct-connect configuration and switch configuration deployment. Both configurations require four ports (10 Gb and 25 Gb) on each VxRail node.

Direct-connect configuration

In Figure 6.6, you can see four 10 Gb ports in a direct-connect configuration. There are four 10 Gb ports on each VxRail node, and the Top of Rack (TOR) switch is a 10 Gb network switch. Ports 1 and 2 (P1 and P2) of each VxRail node are connected to the network switch, and both ports are used for the management and vSAN Witness networks. Ports 3 and 4 (P3 and P4) of VxRail Node 1 are directly connected to ports P3 and P4 of VxRail Node 2, and both ports are used for vSAN and vMotion networks:

Figure 6.6 – Four 10 Gb ports in a direct-connect configuration

Now we’ll...