Chapter 1: Overview of VxRail HCI

In the digital economy, most applications provide a 24 x 7 Service-Level Agreement (SLA) for every customer. So, SLAs are very important for all customers. The service provider often faces the expectation that the application service will be available anytime, anywhere, and on any device, and will provide real-time updates, automatically scale up/out, and so on. Actually, most of the traditional infrastructure architecture has some hardware, software, and day-to-day operational limitations, and so on. These limitations mean that the service providers or end users do not have the expertise for planning, upgrading, and reconfiguring the system properly, for example, hardware scaling, software package upgrade, resource planning, central management, Life Cycle Management (LCM), and so on.

The Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) platform is well integrated with hardware and software. It facilitates simplified solutions created from these limitations. The HCI platform can deliver simplified infrastructure deployment and management. One benefit that HCI gives users that traditional architecture cannot is that the end user can easily manage and perform administrative tasks from a central management control place, which is fully integrated with VMware vCenter. In the current market, the Dell EMC VxRail appliance is one such HCI platform engineered and developed by Dell EMC with VMware collaboration. In this chapter, we will discuss the VxRail system; you will get an overview of the VxRail HCI platform.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• What is a VxRail Appliance?
• What's in a VxRail Appliance?
• VxRail licensing
• VxRail system architecture
• VxRail system features
• VxRail system management
• VxRail resources