Our vision at Dell Technologies is to be the essential infrastructure company from the edge, to the core, and to the cloud. Dell EMC Networking ensures modernization for today’s applications and for the emerging cloud-native world. Dell Technologies is committed to disrupting the fundamental economics of the market with an open strategy that gives you the freedom of choice for networking operating systems and top-tier merchant silicon. The Dell Technologies strategy enables business transformations that maximize the benefits of collaborative software and standards-based hardware, including lowered costs, flexibility, freedom, and security. Dell Technologies provides further customer enablement through validated deployment guides, which demonstrates these benefits while maintaining a high standard of quality, consistency, and support.
Dell EMC VxRail sits at the forefront of a fundamental shift in IT infrastructure consumption – away from application-specific, “build-your-own” infrastructure, and toward virtualized, general-purpose, engineered systems. Dell Technologies and VMware have embraced this shift with the VxRail hyperconverged appliance. VxRail has a simple, scale-out architecture that uses VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN to provide server virtualization and software-defined storage.
To take full advantage of the VxRail solution, consider the network that not only connects multiple nodes into a single cohesive cluster, but also enables connectivity to the customer’s IT environment. Numerous industry studies show that networking is the primary source of both deployment issues and poor performance of hyperconverged solutions. Usually, VxRail clusters (minimum of three and maximum of 64 nodes) connect to a preexisting IP network at the customer site. The inclusion of dedicated switches for the VxRail cluster simplifies this process and avoids many of the network connectivity pitfalls associated with the deployment of a hyperconverged solution.
The audience for this configuration guide includes professional services or onsite IT personnel responsible for the deployment of a VxRail cluster when a pair of dedicated Dell EMC PowerSwitch switches is purchased with the cluster. This document covers the process of connecting a cluster of VxRail nodes to a pair of Dell PowerSwitch switches is configured for Virtual Link Trunking (VLT).
This document provides switch topology and OS10 Full Switch mode configuration examples for Dell EMC VxRail 4.7 and Dell EMC VxRail 7.0 clusters using nodes built on 14th generation (14G) PowerEdge servers. Nodes in these examples use 25 GbE network adapters. Switches in this guide use Dell EMC SmartFabric OS10.5.2.