What is VxRail
Vysakh Nair- 12 Jul, 2019
VxRail is part of Dell EMC’s hyper-converged infrastructure offerings, bringing together a streamlined hardware, operating system, and software stack for implementing VMware vSAN. Hyper-converged appliances allow a datacenter in a box approach, rather than buying servers, storage and hypervisor separately hyper-converged appliances bundle the components into one box. The compute storage and hypervisor components used by VxRail are
- Compute –Dell EMC PowerEdge servers
- Storage – VMware vSAN
- Hypervisor – vSphere ESXi
Below are the softwares, which is available or bundled with VxRail Appliance, Vsphere ESXi license should be purchased separately.
- vCentre
- vRealize log insight
- RecoverPoint for VM’s
- vSphere Replication
- vSphere data protection
The minimum number of nodes required is three, however 4 is recommended to allow overhead for failures and maintenance. This is also the minimum number of nodes required to use erasure coding rather than mirroring for data protection. You can manage this by using vSphere Web console as well as VxRail Manager, this allows us to create a new VMware vCenter which will be deployed inside the Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) or you can external deployment.
VxRail Series & Release
Depends on the requirement there are different types on Series available
- G Series: General purpose systems for broad hyperconverged use cases.
- E Series: Low profile systems for everywhere from data center core to edge deployments.
- P Series: Performance optimized systems for heavy workloads such as databases.
- V Series: VDI optimized systems with support for up to three graphics accelerators for specialized use cases such as high-end 2D/3D visualization.
- S Series: Capacity-optimized systems for demanding applications such as virtualized Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, big data, and analytics.
You can compare features of these series in below link
Also, below VMware KB will help to Correlating VxRail Release with VMware build numbers
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