Book Image

Implementing VxRail HCI Solutions

Book Image

Implementing VxRail HCI Solutions

Overview of this book

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) can help you simplify the provisioning and daily operations of computing and storage. With this book, you'll understand how HCI can offload the day 0 deployment and day-to-day operations of a system administrator. You'll explore the VxRail Appliance, which is an HCI solution that provides lifecycle management, automation, and operational simplicity. Starting with an overview of the VxRail Appliance system architecture and components, you'll understand the benefits of the VxRail system and compare it with the environment of traditional servers and storage. As you advance, the book covers topics such as disaster recovery and active-active and active-passive solutions for VxRail. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the confidence to manage the deployment, administration, planning, and design of a VxRail system.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with VxRail HCI System
4
Section 2: Administration of VxRail
10
Section 3: Advanced Solutions for VxRail

VxRail resources

In this section, we will discuss VxRail documentation and resources. This includes the Dell EMC support site, Dell EMC SolVe, and VMware documentation.

As we can see in Figure 1.21, the Dell EMC support site provides access to technical documentation, a knowledge base, and downloads for Dell EMC products. The VxRail documentation can be accessed from https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/vxrail-gen2-hardware:

Figure 1.21 – Dell Technologies support portal

Figure 1.21 – Dell Technologies support portal

Dell EMC SolVe is interactive software used by Dell EMC employees, partners, and customers. It has two versions: SolVe Online (Figure 1.22) and SolVe Desktop (Figure 1.23). Dell EMC SolVe is used to generate the detailed step-by-step procedures for installing and configuring Dell EMC products, such as VxRail appliances, Unity XT storage, RP4VM, and so on:

Figure 1.22 – Dell Technologies SolVe Online

Figure 1.22 – Dell Technologies SolVe Online

SolVe Online is a web-based application. You can access SolVe Online with this link: https://solveonline.emc.com/solve/products.

SolVe Desktop is Windows-based software. To access SolVe Desktop, you can download and install the SolVe Desktop utility from the Dell EMC support site at https://support.emc.com:

Figure 1.23 – Dell Technologies SolVe Desktop

Figure 1.23 – Dell Technologies SolVe Desktop

Important note

You need a Dell EMC employee, partner, or customer account to access both SolVe Online and Desktop.

Since VMware vSphere with vSAN is running on VxRail, the VMware documentation is also valid for the VxRail environment. As shown in Figure 1.24, you can find the VMware vSphere and vSAN documentation at https://docs.vmware.com/:

Figure 1.24 – VMware documentation website

Figure 1.24 – VMware documentation website

If you have any technical or support questions about your VxRail Appliance, you can use the preceding tools to find relevant information.