VxRail HCI System Software consists of multiple, integrated software elements. They extend VMware native capabilities to deliver a seamless and automated operational experience, keeping the infrastructure in a prevalidated configuration to ensure that workloads are consistently up and running. VxRail HCI System Software is preinstalled on the VxRail system as a single virtual machine, the VxRail Manager VM.

The software services in VxRail HCI System Software can be grouped into three main areas: life cycle management (LCM) for predictable outcomes, management flexibility and extensibility, and simplified services and support experience.

Life cycle management for predictable outcomes

• Intelligent LCM functionality automatically updates clusters with prevalidated, pretested software and firmware components, ensuring that the HCI stack is in a Continuously Validated State.
• The electronic compatibility matrix serves as a compliance asset, providing validation that all possible configuration and update path permutations are sound. Customers can choose the Continuously Validated State of their choice to optimize each cluster for its respective workloads.
• Ecosystem connectors tightly integrate with infrastructure components, including vSAN, PowerEdge server components, and networking. This integration enables automation and orchestration services across the entire stack for simple cluster software and firmware updates.

Management flexibility and extensibility

• VxRail Manager, which is natively integrated with and accessed through vCenter, is the overall management engine for all VxRail operations. VxRail Manager is used to deploy, manage, update, patch, and add nodes to a cluster.
• SaaS multicluster management is designed to provide centralized multi-cluster management powered by AI-driven operations insights through a software-as-a-service delivery model. The continuous innovation and continuous delivery approach allows for frequent, incremental updates to introduce new capabilities. SaaS multicluster management provides detailed health checks and predictive analytics. SaaS multicluster management further simplifies the VxRail cluster update process with on-demand pre-update health checks, update bundle download and staging, and cluster updates at scale.
• A broad set of publicly available RESTful APIs are provided to customers to deliver greater cloud and IT automation extensibility.

Simplified services and support experience

Customers always have access to Dell Secure Remote Services for all included hardware and software within VxRail throughout the entire life cycle of the infrastructure.

Figure 7.   Core components of VxRail HCI System Software

When used for a cloud deployment use case, the VxRail HCI System Software sits in between the infrastructure layer and cloud orchestration software. Local management features include vCenter Plug-ins, life cycle management, serviceability using eServices and Secure Remote Gateway, and health alerts. The extensibility of VxRail HCI System Software is available to VMware SDDC solutions like VMware Cloud Foundation including backend APIs, SaaS multicluster management, and open REST APIs for configuration management solutions such as Puppet and Ansible.

VxRail Manager

VxRail Manager features user-friendly workflows for automating VxRail deployment and configuration and for monitoring the health of individual systems in the entire cluster. VxRail Manager also incorporates functionality for hardware serviceability and system platform life cycle management. For instance, it guides system administrators through the process of adding systems to an existing cluster, and it automatically detects new systems when they come online. VxRail Manager is also used to replace failed disk drives without disrupting availability to generate and download diagnostic log bundles and apply VMware updates or software patches nondisruptively across VxRail nodes. 

With the VxRail Manager plug-in for vCenter Server, all VxRail Manager features are integrated with and accessible from the vCenter Server so that users can benefit from them on a familiar management interface. With the VxRail Manager plug-in, the vCenter Server can manage physical hardware of the VxRail cluster.

VxRail HCI System Software simplifies system platform life cycle management by delivering patch software and update notifications that can be automatically installed without interruption or downtime.

The VxRail Manager functionality visible through the HTML5 vCenter plug-in is illustrated in the following screenshots. Figure 8 displays a vCenter view showing the VMware Cloud Foundation management domain that is built on VxRail clusters.

Figure 8.   vCenter view showing VMware Cloud Foundation management domain

Figure 9 shows the top level four node management cluster VxRail hardware view.

Figure 9.   VxRail cluster physical view

Drilling down on the physical views can display additional details. For example, Figure 10 shows a hardware view used for disk hardware replacement.

Figure 10.    VxRail disk hardware replacement screen

Detailed VxRail hardware component level events and alerts are collected by the VxRail Manager and displayed in vCenter as part of the integrated vCenter HTML5 plug-in. This provides holistic, system-level health awareness within the SDDC management framework. Failure events are passed to vCenter. Alarms from VxRail start with the prefix ‘VXR.’ Figure 11 shows an example in vCenter that displays VxRail hardware alarms.

Figure 11.    Example of VxRail hardware alarms in the vCenter HTML5 plug-in

VxRail HCI version 7.0.010 introduced support for geographic location tags for VxRail nodes. The capability allows for important user-defined node metadata that can assist many customers in gaining greater visibility of the physical location mapping of the HCI infrastructure that makes up their cloud. Customers can leverage this data to choose the node/host order to be displayed in the VxRail Manager vCenter plug-in Physical View. These geo location host attribute tags can be applied during VxRail Day 1 cluster installation or during node expansion and host edit Day 2 operations (see Figure 12).

This functionality provides customers with full-stack physical-to-virtual infrastructure mapping to help further extend the VMware Cloud Foundation management experience and simplify operations only available with VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail.

In addition, VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 on VxRail 7.0.400 (and higher) allows customers to add user-defined tags to VCF objects within SDDC Manager. For instance, administrators can add user-defined tags to cluster objects for a logical grouping based on location, type of environment, workload, and so on.

Figure 12.    Example of VxRail geo location host tags in the vCenter plug-in

REST APIs

VxRail HCI System Software includes APIs that enables customers to leverage the full power of automation and orchestration services across data centers. This extensibility allows infrastructure to operate with cloud-like scale and agility and streamlines the integration of the infrastructure into your IT environment and processes. Instead of manually managing environments through the user interface, repeatable operations can be triggered and performed programmatically by software. More customers are embracing DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) models as they need reliable and repeatable processes to configure the underlying infrastructure resources required for applications. IaC leverages APIs to store configurations in code, making it repeatable and reduces error risk.

VxRail API is a feature of VxRail HCI System Software that exposes management functions with a RESTful application programming interface. It is to simplify VxRail customer and ecosystem partner experiences, who would like to integrate third-party products with a VxRail system.

VxRail API was designed to complement VMware REST APIs, such as vSphere Automation API, and focuses on the underlying infrastructure and unique automated life cycle management capabilities. VxRail API can be used with VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell VxRail API, which is supported since version 4.0 of the platform. Most of the operations that required SDDC Manager UI can now be performed using API. This is an area of extensive development with new capabilities growing over time important especially for service providers, who are leveraging VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail as a platform to deliver cloud-based services for their customers.

To learn more about VxRail API, see this solution overview. For more information about VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail API, see the API reference guide.