The release of VxRail Dynamic Nodes brought improved VxRail deployment flexibility by:
- Using VxRail for compute clusters with vSAN HCI Mesh.
- Using storage arrays with VxRail dynamic nodes in VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail.
- Extending the benefits of VxRail HCI System Software to traditional 3-tier architectures using Dell for primary storage.
The newest adjacency in 7.0.320 is the VxRail Satellite Node, as sometimes even a two-node cluster may be too much.
A VxRail satellite node is ideal for those workloads where the SLA and compute demands do not justify even the smallest of two-node clusters. In the past, you might have even recycled a desktop to meet these requirements. Think retail and ROBO with their many distributed sites, or 5G with its “shared nothing” architecture. But in today’s IT environment, out of sight cannot mean out of mind. Workloads are everywhere and anywhere. The datacenter and the public cloud are just two of the many locations where workloads exist, and compute is needed. The challenge for IT is managing and maintaining the growing and varied infrastructure demands of workloads outside of the data center, like the edge, in its many different forms. The demands of the edge vary greatly. But even with infrastructure needs met with a single server, IT is still on the hook for managing and maintaining it.
While satellite nodes are a single-node extension of VxRail, they are managed, and lifecycled by the VxRail manager from a VxRail with vSAN cluster (as shown in following figure). These single nodes should not be regarded as “lightweights.” They leverage all the varied hardware options of existing VxRail nodes with added support for the PERC H755 adapter for local RAID protected storage. This provides satellite node options that start as lightweight as an eight-core Intel Xeon Gen 3 Scalable processor and spinning disks all the way up to a system with dual 40-core Intel Xeon Gen 3 Scalable processors--accelerated by a pair of NVIDIA Ampere A100 80 GB Data Center GPUs (with over 150 TB of flash storage).
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