December is a time of celebration and anticipation, a month in which we may reflect on the events of the year and look ahead to what is yet to come. Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” – and its many stage and movie remakes – is one of those literary classics that helps showcase this season’s magic at its finest. It is even said that there is a special kind of magic—one full of excitement, innovation, and productivity—that finds a way to (hyper)converge the past, present, and future for data center administrators all around the world who have been good all year!  

No, your wondering eyes do not deceive you. Appearing today are VxRail’s next generation platforms—the VE-660 and VP-760—in all-new, all-NVMe configurations! While Santa’s elves have spent the year building their backlog of toys and planning supply-chain delivery logistics that rival SLA standards of the world’s largest e-tailers, the VxRail team has been hard at work innovating our VxRail family portfolio to ensure that your workloads can run faster than ever before. So, let’s grab a glass of eggnog and invite the holiday spirits along for a tour of VxRail past, present, and future to better understand our latest portfolio addition.

Figure 1. VxRail VE-660

Figure 2. VxRail VP-760

Spirit of VxRail Past

Figure 3. Santa still runs 3-tier architecture. He needs VxRail and the speed of NVMe!When VxRail first launched almost 8 years ago in early 2016, we introduced the concept of hyperconverged infrastructure to the masses with one easily-managed platform that combined best-of-breed Dell PowerEdge servers with VMware technology. This new age of data center management brought better performance, extended capabilities, and time-saving advantages to data center admins everywhere. Over the years, we’ve sought to improve the offering by taking advantage of the latest hardware standards and technologies. 

This was especially true earlier this summer when we launched the VE-660 and VP-760 VxRail platforms based on 16^th Generation Dell PowerEdge servers. These next-gen successors to the VxRail E-Series and P-Series platforms not only contained the latest hardware innovations, but also represented a systemic change in the overall VxRail offering. 

First, the mainline E- and P-series platforms were respectively re-christened as the VE-660 and VP-760. This was done primarily to invite easier comparison points to the underlying PowerEdge servers on which they’re based – the R660 and R760. Second, we tracked how the use of accelerators in the data center had evolved over the years and made the strategic decision to fold the capabilities of the V-Series platform into the P-Series by way of specific riser configurations. Now, customers have the ability to glean all the benefits of a high-performant 2U system with the choice of either storage-optimized (up to 28 total drive bays) or accelerator-optimized (up to 2x double wide or 6x single wide GPUs) chassis configurations—whichever best aligns to the specifics of their workload needs. And third, VxRail platforms dropped the storage type suffix from the model name. Hybrid and all-flash (and as of today, all-NVME–more on this later) storage variants are now offered as part of the riser configuration selection options of these baseline platforms, where applicable.

These changes are representative of how the breadth and depth of customer needs have grown tremendously over the years. By taking these steps to streamline the VxRail portfolio, we charted an evolutionary path forward that continues our commitment to offer greater customer choice and flexibility.

Spirit of VxRail Present

These themes of greater choice and flexibility are amplified by the architectural improvements underpinning these new VxRail platforms. Primary among them is the introduction of Intel® 4^th Generation Xeon® Scalable processors. Intel’s latest generation of processors do more than bump VxRail core density per socket to 56 (112 max per node). They also come with built-in AMX accelerators (Advanced Matrix Extensions) that support AI and HPC workloads without the need for any additional drivers or hardware. For a deeper dive into the Intel® AMX capability set, the Spirit of VxRail Present invites you to read this blog: VxRail and Intel® AMX, Bringing AI Everywhere, authored by Una O’Herlihy.

Intel’s latest processors also usher in support for DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 5, two other architectural pillars that underpin significant jumps in performance. The following table offers a high-level overview and comparison of these pillars and a useful at-a-glance primer for those considering a technology refresh from earlier generation VxRail:

Table 1. VxRail 14th Generation to 16th Generation comparison

As the operational needs of a business change day-by-day, finding the right balance between workload density and load balance can often feel like an infinite war for resources. The adoption of DDR5 memory across the latest generation of VxRail platforms offers additional flexibility in the way system resources can be divvied up by virtue of two key benefits: greater memory density and faster bandwidth. The VE-660 and VP-760 wield eight memory channels per processor, with the ability to slot up to two 4800MT/s DIMMs per channel for a maximum memory capacity of 8TB per node. Compared to a VxRail P570, the density and speed improvements are staggering: 33% more memory channels per processor, 2.6x increase in per system total memory, and up to a 64% increase in memory speed! With faster and greater density compute and memory available for workloads, each node in a VxRail cluster can handle more VMs, and if there is ever a case of task bottlenecking, there are plenty of resources still available for optimal load balancing.

When we consider the presence of PCIe Gen 5, we see an even greater increase in the overall performance envelope. PowerEdge’s Next-Generation Tech Note does a great job of contextualizing the capabilities of PCIe Gen 5. The main takeaway for VxRail, however, is that it increases the maximum bandwidth achievable from various peripheral components by roughly 25% when compared to PCIe Gen 4 and roughly 66% when compared to PCIe Gen 3. In particular, the jump in available PCIe lanes (48 lanes to a luxurious 80 lanes) and associated throughput (8 GT/s to 32 GT/s per lane) from Gen 3 to Gen 5 significantly reduces performance bottlenecks, resulting in faster storage transfer rates and more bandwidth for accelerators to process AI and ML workloads. 

PCIe Gen 5 is also backwards compatible with previous generation peripherals, enabling a certain degree of flexibility with respect to VxRail’s component extensibility and longevity in the data center. Yesterday’s technologies can still be used, but the VE-660 and VP-760 can adapt to growing workload demands by taking full advantage of the latest peripherals as they are released. They are even equipped with an additional PCIe slot over their E- & P-Series predecessors, providing extra dimensions of configuration. These boons in flexibility ensure any investment into this generation of VxRail enjoys longer relevance as your infrastructure backbone.

Spirit of VxRail Future

Even with all these architectural improvements defining the VP-760 and VE-660, we knew we could find ways of improving the capability set. So, we made our list of desired features (and checked it twice!) and determined that the best way to augment these next-generation hardware enhancements would be with the introduction of all-NVMe storage options. 

The Spirit of VxRail Past wishes to remind us that VxRail with all-NVMe storage is not new—NVMe first made its way to the VxRail lineup with the P580N and E560N almost four years ago and has been a mainstay facet of the VxRail with vSAN architecture ever since. However, what is most compelling about all-NVMe versions of the VE-660 and VP-760—what the Spirit of VxRail Future wishes to strongly communicate—is that NVMe opens the door to two very compelling benefits: additional flexibility of choice with respect to vSAN architecture and an associated increase in overall storage capacity with the addition of read intensive NVMe drives in sizes of up to 15.36TB.

The following figure outlines all of the generational advantages customers can benefit from when transitioning from existing 14^th Generation VxRail environments to VP-760 all-NVMe platforms.

Figure 4. The VxRail 16th Generation all-NVMe advantage

In addition, VxRail on 16^th Generation hardware can now support deployments with either vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) or vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA). David Glynn provided a great summary of the core value vSAN ESA brings to the table for VxRail in his blog written nearly a year ago. With today’s launch, the VP-760 and VE-660 can now take advantage of vSAN ESA’s single-tier storage architecture that enables RAID-5 resiliency and capacity with RAID-1 performance. Customers who choose to deploy with vSAN OSA can also see the benefit of these new read intensive NVMe drives, with a total storage per node of up to 122.88TB in the VE-660 and 322.56TB in the VP-760. For those who deploy with vSAN ESA, maximum achievable storage is 153.6TB on the VE-660 and up to 368.64TB on the VP-760.

The Spirit of VxRail Future has seen the value of all-NVMe and is content knowing that VxRail will continue to underpin VMware mission-critical workloads for years to come.

Resources

• VxRail Spec Sheet
• Dell Technologies VxRail

Author: Mike Athanasiou, Sr. Engineering Technologist