The Dell EMC VxRail HCI appliance is available in 1U or 2U rack building blocks. It is built on VMware vSAN technology and further enabled with Dell Technologies software.

The following figure shows the components of the VxRail appliance.

VxRail Appliance platforms are equipped with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors. You can deploy a cluster with as few as three nodes, providing an ideal environment for small deployments. To achieve full vSAN high availability (HA), the recommended starting block is four nodes. The VxRail appliance can support storage-heavy workloads with storage-dense nodes, graphics-heavy VDI workloads with GPU hardware coupled with virtual GPU software, and entry-level nodes for remote and branch office environments.

The VxRail Appliance enables you to start small and scale as your requirements increase. Single-node scaling and low-cost entry point options give you the freedom to buy the right amount of storage and compute resources to start and then add capacity to support growth. A single-node VxRail V Series appliance can be configured with 16 to 56 CPU cores per node and supports a maximum of 40 TB raw storage with a hybrid configuration of 76 TB with the all-flash option. A 64-node all-flash cluster delivers a maximum of 3,584 cores and 4,864 TB of raw storage. The following table shows the available platforms.

VxRail Manager, which is available on VxRail appliances only, is the primary deployment and element manager interface of the appliance. VxRail Manager simplifies the entire life cycle from deployment through management, scaling, and maintenance. It also enables single-click upgrades and dashboard monitoring for health, events, and physical views.