Easing Life Cycle Management with VxRail
Thu, 13 Oct 2022 22:47:20 -0000
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This is the second article in a series introducing VxRail concepts.
I mentioned in the introduction blog that I previously worked in Technical Support for Dell. That experience really set the stage for me to embrace VxRail because the VxRail approach to life cycle management eases a lot of the pain points I saw in support engagements. Many of the issues I saw were resolved with system updates, and VxRail makes moving through the life cycle significantly easier than with traditional hardware or an internally built solution. We do this with our state management model, known as Continuously Validated States. Let’s take some time to understand what these are, because they help enable VxRail customers to do more with their infrastructure more easily than before.
Defining a state
I’m someone who likes to be thorough, so if you already understand what a system state is, then you can skip this section. But for readers newer to infrastructure, this might be a different way to think about things. A system state, be it good or bad, refers to the hardware, firmware, drivers, and system software that power the infrastructure. When your servers or clusters are in a “good” or “happy” state, then everything is working optimally. A “bad” or “faulty” state might have a compatibility issue creating crashes, or it might contain failed hardware. Replacing failed hardware is an example of modifying the hardware state. Modifying the software state might look like an update to VMware software. All these changes then represent new individual states.
VxRail takes the chaos out of traditional state management for customers and replaces it with confidence. VxRail Continuously Validated States make the exchange from chaos to confidence possible. Updating a cluster, such as to a new vCenter version, means changing a cluster, and that change introduces uncertainty. That uncertainty is natural because customers are moving their infrastructure into new unknown configurations.
Let’s discuss the “Validated” portion of Continuously Validated States. VxRail engineering validates the current state, the state you intend to go to, and the continuity through the update cycle. Customers can gain tremendous value by relying on VxRail Engineering to validate all three aspects of an upgrade. This is the “Validated” part of Continuously Validated States that completely inverts the experience I got used to while working in Technical Support.
Moving to a new state
When you make a change, such as adding a driver or updating system software, you are modifying the system state. Making changes to system states has always been a problem with different remediation strategies that have revealed new IT challenges. I believe the challenge that Continuously Validated States best addresses can be described as, “I need my infrastructure to help me respond to new business needs and make moving through the life cycle as easy as possible.” Modifying an HCI cluster designed internally would present additional difficulties because you don’t know what kind of behavior to expect without testing.
This kind of change anxiety is what the validation process in our state-creation process aims to correct. Before the VxRail Engineering team releases a new VxRail update package—a package that would change your cluster’s system state, the package is tested in the team’s dedicated testing facility for nearly 800,000 cumulative hours. The facility has comprehensive access to the hardware that VxRail supports, allowing thorough testing. The purpose of this testing is to first ensure that all the new supported configurations are stable and then ensure that the move from old cluster states to the new states is a reliable process.
Lifecycle continuity
The creation of a series of known-good configurations isn’t the only benefit VxRail can provide with this different approach to state management. Let’s talk about the continuity that Continuously Validated States provide. VxRail clusters spend their entire lives conforming with and moving between different configurations supported and defined by the Continuously Validated State. This creates a continuity that begins from the time a cluster is first unloaded from the truck, persists through the changes of both the update cycle and hardware modification, and continues on to the final point of cluster retirement.
Let’s tie these ideas together. I like to think of Continuously Validated States as being like a GPS that helps avoid road construction during a cluster’s life. VxRail can do this because our engineering teams are building the roads and identifying the best routes. Go ahead and imagine a map for me. I like to imagine a map of my home state. No matter what kind of map, it’s going to have a bunch of points and show you how to move from one point to another. Continuously Validated States serve a similar role for your clusters. Much like the points on your map, each of these states verifies new hardware and software versions for customers to move their clusters to. These states serve another role like that of a GPS—they help identify the ideal paths between states and help clusters efficiently move between them. As you might have guessed, the Continuously Validated States model isn’t simple cartography. This ideal path is identified through hundreds of thousands of testing hours performed by VxRail Engineering team members in a massive million-dollar lab environment. Those movement paths, in combination with software tooling in the update process, create continuity for clusters as they move between states and proceed through their life cycles.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this blog has helped distinguish how Continuously Validated States change configuration management for the better. Changing the configuration state of production clusters is an anxiety-generating action that VxRail eases by creating, testing, and validating known-good configuration states for customers. The result is that customers can update their equipment with more confidence than ever and spend more IT resources focused on enabling business projects than on performing maintenance tasks. Mike Athanasiou, a colleague of mine, did a fantastic job with our Interactive Journey video series. In the videos, Mike shows how the use of Continuously Validated States enhances different areas of cluster management. I found the videos helpful in better understanding VxRail.
The next entry in this blog series will address the advantage that VxRail offers in the update process.