Joint engineering between Dell and VMware leads to a seamless, curated, and optimized hyperconverged experience. This deep integration combined with the simplicity of VxRail HCI System Software and the performance of next-generation PowerEdge servers provides an ideal platform across core, edge, and cloud.
The VxRail Appliance (as shown in the following figure) is developed and powered by Dell and VMware. It is a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliance that is exclusively integrated and pre-configured with VMware vSphere and Software-Defined Storage. VxRail HCI systems are fully integrated with the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) with the VxRail Manager plugin. The VxRail Appliance can deliver resiliency and centralized management to a system administrator and can easily perform all operations and configurations via the VxRail Manager plugin in VMware vCenter Server.
Dell VxRail delivers an agile infrastructure with full stack integrity and end-to-end lifecycle management to drive operational efficiency, reduce risks, and help free up teams to focus on the business. Adoption of VxRail systems that break down operational silos and enable continuous innovation through rapid provisioning and deployment of workloads results in significant cost savings and operational efficiencies.
VxRail systems enable IT organizations to drive business opportunities rather than simply support business operations. VxRail is the first and only HCI system jointly engineered with VMware to eliminate the operational complexity of deploying, provisioning, managing, monitoring, and updating of HCI.
HCI platforms deliver compute, software-defined storage with vSAN and networking infrastructure services in a cluster of PowerEdge servers. HCI collapses the core components of the traditional data center—compute and storage—into a server. Because HCI is software-defined—which means the infrastructure operations are logically separated from the physical hardware—the integration between components is much tighter. HCI manages everything as a single system through a common toolset.
VxRail systems are optimized for VMware vSAN software, which is fully integrated in the kernel of vSphere and provides full-featured, cost-effective, software-defined storage. vSAN implements an efficient architecture, built directly into the hypervisor. This distinguishes vSAN from solutions that typically install a virtual storage appliance that runs as a guest VM on each host.
Embedding vSAN into the ESXi kernel layer has advantages in performance and memory requirements. It has little impact on CPU utilization (less than 10 percent) and self-balances based on workload and resource availability. It presents storage as a familiar data store construct and works seamlessly with other vSphere features such as VMware vSphere vMotion and Storage Policy Based Management to provide the flexibility to easily configure the appropriate level of service for each VM.
vSphere is a well-established virtualization platform, a familiar usable entity in most data centers. Dell leverages vSphere for ESXi-based virtualization and VM networking in multiple product offerings and supports a common set of VMware and Dell services. This overlap enables a VxRail implementation to integrate smoothly into VMware-centric data centers and to operate in concert with Dell converged, hyperconverged, and traditional storage offerings.
VxRail HCI System Software (shown in the following figure) is the foundation for the value differentiating the capabilities of VxRail. From an infrastructure stack perspective, the management software runs on top of the VMware software and the PowerEdge server to allow VxRail to act as a singular unified system.
Continuously validated states—VxRail runs on pre-tested and validated software and firmware for the entire VxRail stack, including the VMware software and PowerEdge server components. VxRail lifecycle management capabilities ensure that VxRail clusters run in that known good state throughout its entire lifecycle as the cluster goes through continuous changes to take advantage of the latest VMware software innovation, security fixes, or bug fixes. Continuously Validated States is the term that encapsulates the configuration stability delivered by VxRail clusters.
Electronic compatibility matrix—With different software and hardware components in the stack, VxRail team is continuously testing and validating against the entire stack so any desired state the user determines from the VMware compatibility matrix has been validated as a Continuously Validated State. In addition, VxRail refers to this matrix to ensure the cluster configuration stays in compliance. These benefits drastically reduce the testing effort and resources a customer need to invest while also giving the customer the peace of mind to predictably and securely evolve their VxRail clusters without impacting application workloads.
Ecosystem connectors—To build an extensive Electronic Compatibility Matrix, VxRail has to communicate with ecosystem members in the stack, including vSphere, vSAN, vCenter, and the PowerEdge server and multiple hardware components within. The connectors allow VxRail to know the software and firmware versions running in each component and lifecycle manage those components. The automation and orchestration capabilities allow VxRail to be managed as a singular unified system.
VxRail manager—The primary management user interface for VxRail is the vCenter plugin called VxRail Manager. It provides a fully integrated vCenter experience. VxRail users can perform any VxRail activity through this interface, including:
- Performing initial cluster configuration
- Monitoring hardware components
- Performing graceful cluster shutdown
- Expanding the cluster by adding nodes
- Updating VxRail HCI System Software