Dell VxRail Appliances are a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution that consolidates compute, storage, and network into a single, highly available, unified system. With careful planning, VxRail Appliances can be rapidly deployed into an existing data center environment, and the end-product is immediately available to deploy applications and services.

VxRail is an appliance that is based on a collection of nodes and switches that are integrated as a cluster under a single point of management. All physical compute, network, and storage resources in the appliance are managed as a single shared pool. They are allocated to applications and services according to customer-defined business and operational requirements.

VxRail has a simple, scale-out architecture, leveraging VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN to provide server virtualization and software-defined storage. VxRail Manager provides simplified deployment, upgrades, and maintenance. Fundamental to the VxRail clustered architecture is network connectivity. It is through the logical and physical networks that individual nodes act as a single system providing scalability, resiliency, and workload balance.

The VxRail software bundle is preloaded onto the compute nodes, and consists of the following components (specific software versions not shown):

• VxRail Manager
• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSAN
• VMware vSphere

Licenses are required for VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN. You can purchase the vSphere licenses from Dell Technologies, VMware, or your preferred VMware reseller partner.

The VxRail Appliances also include the following licenses for software that is available for download, installation, and configuration:

• Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines (RP4VM)

• Five full VM licenses per single node (E, V, P, D, and S series)
• Fifteen full VM licenses for the G Series chassis