A VxRail appliance consists of a set of server nodes that are designed and engineered for VxRail. A VxRail physical node starts as a standard Dell PowerEdge server. The Dell PowerEdge server next goes through a manufacturing process following VxRail product engineering specifications to produce a VxRail node ready for shipment. The set of components that are manufactured into VxRail nodes is based on the customer purchase order. The set of VxRail nodes is delivered ready for data center installation and connectivity into the data center network infrastructure.
Once the data center installation and network connectivity are complete, and the equipment is powered on, use the VxRail management interface to perform the initialization process. That process forms the final product: a VxRail cluster.
A VxRail cluster starts with a minimum of two nodes and can scale to a maximum of 64 nodes. Planned business use cases, and factors such as performance and capacity, primarily drive the selection of the VxRail nodes to form a cluster. Five series of VxRail models are offered, each targeting specific objectives:
Table 1. VxRail models target objectives
VxRail Series | Target Objective |
E-Series | Balanced Compute and Storage, Space Optimized (1U1N chassis) |
V-Series | Virtual Desktop Enablement |
P-Series | High Performance |
S-Series | Storage Dense |
G-Series | Compute Dense, Space Optimized (2U4N chassis) |
D-Series | Durable, ruggedized, short-depth platforms that are designed to withstand extreme conditions |
Each VxRail model series offers choices for network connectivity. The following figures show some of the physical network port options for the VxRail models.
Figure 1. Back view of VxRail E-Series node
Figure 2. Back view of VxRail V-, P-, and S-Series node
Figure 3. Back view of VxRail G-Series node