VxRail, Dell/EMC’s hyper-converged infrastructure( HCI), formerly EVO Rail, has come a long way in the form of technologies and features. In its infancy, VxRail was complicated and clunky, now it is an administrator’s dream to manage and maintain. With the partnership between Dell/EMC and VMWare, not to mention the costly purchase that Dell went through in purchasing both EMC and VMware, Michael Dell saw huge potential in this product to get people to the cloud. Even AWS sees the same potential, because VxRail is almost a replica to the newly announced AWS Outpost. A few numbers to mention to put the success of VxRail in perspective:
- More than 60% of 3-tier architecture customers will adopt HCI in 2017
- More than 40% of HCI customers use VxRail for primary infrastructure
- More than 45% of customers are deploying mixed workloads i.e. VDI, ERP, and Cloud
- Lowers costs of IT operations by as much as 56%
- 60% more efficient IT teams, removing the “oh that’s the storage guys job” 🙂
- Gartner has recently named VxRail number 1 in: ERP, Mission Critical and VDI
VxRail is designed as a solution that will grow with your company, this is referred to as scale out. Scale out is the process of starting with N (4 nodes), as your company grows, you purchase and add N (1, 2, 3, etc) to the VxRail cluster. These platforms are Dell-only servers from the R540 to R740xd families -from hybrid to all flash nodes.
Best practice designing is to start out with 4 nodes or higher to enable erasure coding on all-flash storage, however, the minimum node count requirement is 3 nodes. VxRail and vSAN have made it even easier, as of its latest release, to now have a VxRail in a remote office branch office with only 2 nodes. This breakthrough allows a company to continue operations with only a 2-node cluster leveraging RecoverPoint for VM’s or vSphere Replication. One caveat to the 2-node cluster, it cannot be scaled out, but there are plans to make this happen in the future. BUT why scale out at a remote office when you have a datacenter you can easily scale in.
When it comes to departmental efficiency, IT Director’s and above look at how they can maximize their employees’ skills, Dell/EMC and VMware see that and have developed a solution, the latest release of VxRail Manager 4.7 allows administrators to use vCenter as the single-pane of glass for both VxRail cluster management and VMWare operations. Prior to 4.7, administrators would have to manage the VxRail cluster from VxRail Manager Web UI and VMware operations from vCenter. This increases the efficiency in a department and allows cross-employment opportunities. A server can now be fully provisioned in less than a quarter of a workday -no more having to zone fiber and assign LUN’s to specific servers and have vCenter discover them on all hosts. Nope, with VxRail, it is simply a one-click process.
Other notable enhancements to VxRail 4.7
- vSphere 6.7 Update 1 (Full-featured HTML5 interface support!)
- Support for mixed 10/25Gbe networking
- Pre-failure health alerting (Being proactive is key to operational efficiency)
- Unified Lifecycle Management for hardware and software
- Tiered software package for vSAN (purchase vSAN licensing right for you)
- SmartFabric OS10 ToR switching using Dell/EMC S4100 series switches
- Integration with vRealize Operations, vRealize Orchestrator, vRealize Log Insight
- Easily deploy NSX for network virtualization
*Note* When upgrading to the latest code of 4.7, there will be some administrative interaction for the input of a temporary IP address. This IP address is used to migrate data from your current VCSA to a new VCSA. Once the migration is complete, the old VCSA will be removed and the new VCSA will be re-ip’ed to the original VCSA
Two peas in a pod, VxRail is the only jointly engineered appliance for software defined data center operations utilizing VMWare Cloud Foundation, enabling a company to connect their workloads to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. With a jointly engineered solution comes guard rails, these guard rails act to keep the appliance operating optimally while taking full advantage of life cycle management and add-ons such as SDDC.
I wanted to save the best for last, as a former IT Manager, I have always had the mindset, servers are a commodity item, they all contain the same internal components, with that said, it is difficult to differentiate key features since you can pay to build any server with the components you need. One thing you cannot guarantee or put a price on is the extraordinary support DELL/EMC puts on their products, specifically VxRail. VxRail is the ONLY HCI appliance across the industry that has a single point of contact for support with both hardware and software.
Jonathan Ingram was a Solutions Architect now he and his family own Premier Broadband & Consulting, LLC. a managed services company specializing in servers, storage, networking, cybersecurity, and services. He has designed and deployed VxRail over three dozen times and is a 2xVCP (Network Virtualization and Datacenter Virtualization) and a certified Dell/EMC VxRail Implementation and Deployment Specialist and Certified Dell/EMC Network Professional.
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