Implementing VxRail HCI Solutions

Victor Wu

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781801071703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Virtualización

Plan, design, deploy, and administer the solutions available in VxRail ApplianceKey Features• Learn how to plan and design the VxRail HCI system• Understand VxRail's administration, lifecycle management, and cluster scale-out• Explore migration methodologies for VxRail systemsBook DescriptionHyper-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.What you will learn• Set up the hardware and software requirements for a VxRail installation• Monitor the status of VxRail appliances with the VxRail Manager plugin• Get to grips with all the administration interfaces used to manage the VxRail appliance• Understand vCenter roles and permissions management in the VxRail cluster• Discover best practices for vSAN configuration in the VxRail cluster• Find out about VxRail cluster scale-out rules and how to expand the VxRail cluster• Deploy active-passive solutions for VxRail with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)Who this book is forIf you are a system architect, system administrator, or consultant involved in planning and deploying VxRail HCI or want to learn how to use VxRail HCI, then this book is for you. Equivalent knowledge and administration experience with ESXi and vCenter Server will be helpful.

Section 1: Getting Started with VxRail HCI System

In this section, we will have an overview of VxRail HCI System and VxRail installation, which will include the VxRail architecture and software, and the management and preparation of VxRail deployments.

This section of the book comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Overview of VxRail HCI
• Chapter 2, VxRail Installation

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

What is a VxRail Appliance?

The VxRail Appliance (as seen in Figure 1.1) is developed and powered by Dell EMC and VMware. It is an HCI appliance that is exclusively integrated and pre-configured with VMware vSphere and Software-Defined Storage (SDS). VxRail HCI systems are fully integrated with the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) with the VxRail Manager plugin. The VxRail Appliance can deliver resiliency and centralized management to a system administrator and can easily perform all operations and configurations via the VxRail Manager plugin in VMware vCenter Server:

Figure 1.1 – Front view of the VxRail system on the Dell 14th-generation PowerEdge server

The VxRail HCI system is pre-configured in Intel-based Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with VMware vSphere and Virtual SAN (vSAN). The VxRail Appliance provides different options for hardware configuration, for example, Intel and AMD processors with options for the number of cores, MEM RAM, 10 Gbps or 25 Gbps network connectivity, a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), storage drives, and so on. VxRail models are available in different form factors, that is, four nodes in a two-unit chassis, one unit per node, and two units per node. These allow customers to buy what they need now. This is one benefit of HCI, that the customer is able to buy and build the system configuration from day one. Since VxRail appliances are fully integrated with VMware products, they are also supported by other VMware solution products, including VMware vRealize, NSX, and SRM, and work as a foundation for SDDC (Software Defined Data Center) and private clouds like VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation). You can go to the VMware website (https://vmware.com) if you want to learn about these VMware products in more detail.

The VxRail Appliance architecture is designed so that customers buy and grow their appliances based on forecasts for their hardware requirements (Dell EMC engineers use the Live Optics sizing tool for VxRail design). Live Optics is online software we can use to collect data about our IT environment and workloads. Live Optics provides data analysis to help us understand our workload performance. The customer can choose different hardware configurations for their different scenarios. The Dell EMC VxRail family includes six types of platforms, that is, E (entry-level) Series, P (performance-optimized) Series, V (VDI-optimized) series, D (durable-platform) Series, S (storage-dense) series, and G (general-purpose) Series.

In VxRail 4.7.100, a two-node VxRail cluster is available. This configuration is only supported on VxRail E Series appliances, which ...