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

VMware vSAN

In this section, we will discuss the vSAN architecture, components, and fault tolerance concepts. VxRail appliances are powered by VMware vSAN. VMware vSAN is the software-defined storage across the vSphere cluster.

Overview

A vSAN cluster supports up to 64 nodes; four nodes are the recommended configuration. Each vSAN node must contain at least one disk group, which includes one Flash device as the cache tier and one magnetic drive as the capacity tier. The network requirement of each vSAN node is a 10 Gb or 25 Gb network interface. They can support 1 GbE as well on single-processor models. Figure 3.7 shows a sample configuration of the vSAN architecture. You can see that there are four physical servers, which are validated and certified hardware from VMware for VMware vSAN deployment. Each vSAN node (VxRail appliance) includes one Flash device and three magnetic drives and could be All-Flash as well. In this vSAN cluster, there are four ESXi hosts and it has one...