{"id":2433,"date":"2023-08-18T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-18T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businessyield.com\/tech\/?p=2433"},"modified":"2023-08-17T22:01:13","modified_gmt":"2023-08-17T22:01:13","slug":"vxrail-all-you-need-to-know-about-dell-technologies-vxrail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businessyield.com\/tech\/technology\/vxrail-all-you-need-to-know-about-dell-technologies-vxrail\/","title":{"rendered":"VXRAIL: All You Need to Know About Dell Technologies’ VxRail","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"

Dell EMC VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance. a jointly engineered hyper-converged infrastructure from Dell EMC and VMware. It is the only fully integrated, pre-configured, and tested HCI system optimized for VMware vSAN software-defined storage and the VMware vSphere ESXi hypervisor. It is also the only one with full VMware Cloud Foundation integration, delivering a complete and automated hybrid cloud platform.<\/p>

Managed through the VMware vCenter interface, VxRail provides existing VMware customers with a consistent and familiar operating experience. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system <\/p>

Like VSPEX Blue — the Dell EMC product that it replaced — and other hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) systems, VxRail includes computing, storage, networking, and virtualization resources in a single device. Specifically, it packages the VMware vSphere vSAN hypervisor and VMware vCenter software on branded Dell servers.<\/p>

Dell Technologies acquired VMware through its 2014 merger with EMC Corp. Since then, Dell has dominated the market for HCI hardware sales, largely on the strength of VxRail, and VMware leads in HCI software revenue.<\/p>

The VxRail flagship product is a key component of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail. Those Dell cloud services streamline on-premises deployment of VMware infrastructure, offering public cloud-like performance at a lower cost.<\/p>

The evolution of VxRail<\/strong><\/h2>

VMware and EMC went back to the drawing board, this time without the other manufacturers, and co-developed a new iteration of EVO:RAIL called VxRail. Unlike the prior iteration, this solution is a focused effort of EMC, VCE, and VMware and is not expected to include any other partners. <\/p>

As this develops, VMware will continue to develop vSAN and EMC will provide the hardware platform and management software. One of the benefits of this new relationship is tighter integration between development teams, which should result in a faster release schedule of new features.<\/p>

VxRail is quantified in terms of appliances and nodes. Through 2016, a minimum VxRail configuration will require 4 nodes sold as a single appliance. Each appliance composes of a 2RU chassis with shared power supplies and 4 slots for nodes. However, customers will now be able to grow VxRail clusters in increments of 1 node at a time (assuming that they already own 1 appliance that contains 4 nodes).<\/p>

How does VxRail work?<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>

VxRail nodes are enclosed in a 1U single-server system, with each node having up to four multicore processors. Users can configure the nodes with SSDs or with a hybrid mix of SSDs and hard disk drives (HDDs). However, Dell requires all nodes within a VxRail cluster to use the same storage configuration.<\/p>

Also, while VxRail models support Ethernet speeds up to 1 GbE, scaling all-flash configuration beyond eight nodes requires at least 10 GbE.<\/p>

Customers can start with a minimum of two VxRail nodes and cluster up to 64 nodes. Depending on the use, Dell EMC may recommend starting with a three-node VxRail building block for failover.<\/p>

Notable Dell EMC VxRail features<\/strong><\/h2>

VxRail offers two major node types: hybrid and all-flash. The hybrid nodes have (1) SSD for read\/write cache and between 3 to 5 SAS drives and the all-flash nodes have (1) SSD for write cache along with 3 to 5 SSD for the capacity tier.<\/p>

It also reflects Dell EMC’s growing reliance on VMware, particularly vSAN, to support enterprise multi-cloud environments. Other features include the following:<\/p>