Innovation with Cloud Foundation on VxRail
Mon, 29 Apr 2024 13:39:20 -0000
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VCF 3.9 ON VxRail 4.7.300 Improves Management, Flexibility, and Simplicity at Scale
December, 2019
As you may already know, VxRail is the HCI foundation for the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. With the new Dell Technologies On Demand offerings we combine the benefits of bringing automation and financial models similar to public cloud to on-premises environments. VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail allows customers to manage all cloud operations through a familiar set of tools, offering a consistent experience, with a single vendor support relationship from Dell EMC.
Joint engineering between VMware and Dell EMC continuously improves VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail. This has made VxRail the first hyperconverged system fully integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation SDDC Manager and is the only jointly engineered HCI system with deep VMware Cloud Foundation integration. VCF on VxRail to delivers unique integrations with Cloud Foundation that offer a seamless, automated upgrade experience. Customers adopting VxRail as the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies Cloud Platform will realize greater flexibility and simplicity when managing VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail at scale. These benefits are further illustrated with the new features available in the latest version of VMware Cloud Foundation 3.9 on VxRail 4.7.300.
The first feature expands the ability to support global management and visibility across large, complex multi-region private and hybrid clouds. This is delivered through global multi-instance management of large-scale VCF 3.9 on VxRail 4.7.300 deployments with a single pane of glass (see figure below). Customers who have many VCF on VxRail instances deployed throughout their environment now have a common dashboard view into all of them to further simplify operations and gain insights.
Figure 1
The new features don’t just stop there, VCF 3.9 on VxRail 4.7.300 provides greater networking flexibility. VMware Cloud Foundation 3.9 on VxRail 4.7.300 adds support for Dell EMC VxRail layer 3 networking stretch cluster configurations, allowing customers to further scale VCF on VxRail environments for more highly available use cases in order to support mission-critical workloads. The layer 3 support applies to both NSX-V and NSX-T backed workload domain clusters.
Another area of new network flexibility features is the ability to select the host physical network adapters (pNICs) you want to assign for NSX-T traffic on your VxRail workload domain cluster (see figure below). Users can now select the pNICs used for the NSX-T Virtual Distributed Switch (N-VDS) from the SDDC Manager UI in the Add VxRail Cluster workflow. This allows you the flexibility to choose from a set of VxRail host physical network configurations that best aligns to your desired NSX-T configuration business requirements. Do you want to deploy your VxRail clusters using the base network daughter card (NDC) ports on each VxRail host for all standard traffic but use separate PCIe NIC ports for NSX-T traffic? Go for it! Do you want to use 10GbE connections for standard traffic and 25GbE for NSX-T traffic? We got you there too! Host network configuration flexibility is now in your hands and is only available with VCF on VxRail.
Figure 2
Finally, no good VCF on VxRail conversation can go by without talking about Lifecycle Management. VMware Cloud Foundation 3.9 on VxRail 4.7.300 also delivers simplicity and flexibility for managing at scale with greater control over workload domain upgrades. Customers now have the flexibility to select the clusters within a multi-cluster workload domain to upgrade in order to better align with business requirements and maintenance windows. Upgrading VCF on VxRail clusters is further simplified with VxRail Smart LCM (4.7.300 release) which determines exactly which firmware components need to be updated on each cluster, pre-stages each node in a cluster saving up to 20% of upgrade time (see next figure). The scheduling of these cluster upgrades is also supported. With VCF 3.9 and VxRail smart LCM, you can streamline the upgrade process across your hybrid cloud.
Figure 3
As you can see the innovation continues with Cloud Foundation on VxRail.
Jason Marques Twitter - @vwhippersnapper Linked In - linkedin.com/in/jason-marques-47022837
Additional Resources
VMware release notes for VCF 3.9 on VxRail 4.7.300
VCF on VxRail Interactive Demos