Introducing VxRail Concepts
Tue, 04 Oct 2022 14:12:18 -0000
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Believe it or not, VxRail has been around for six years! It may not sound like a particularly long time because there are products in the Dell storage portfolio that got their start a couple of decades ago. In any case, the early rapid growth of VxRail created a sizable customer base that has matured and developed into seasoned VxRail users. The figures I last saw cited just over 17,000 customers with some 237,000 nodes deployed. As a new member of the VxRail product group, I can see that our VxRail content has matured and developed with our seasoned customers to an extent that there’s an assumed common knowledge about VxRail. This is amazing for the existing VxRail community, but it would also be nice for people new to VxRail, like me, who are in a different phase of their VxRail journey, to learn about it from the ground up. After a few months on the job, I saw a great opportunity to do just that—create content that gets back to the basics of VxRail and focuses on the fundamentals of VxRail with vSAN and VxRail Dynamic Nodes for traditional SAN architecture.
While I was new to the VxRail technical marketing team at the start of the year, I’d previously spent many years as a Dell Support specialist, primarily working with our PowerEdge servers and Compellent storage offerings. It has definitely been a rewarding experience so far learning about HCI and VxRail—though sometimes it was like trying to drink from a firehose. While I have many resources to lean on, most other folks don’t have the same benefit. That’s why I’m building a blog series that covers the basics of VxRail so you can quickly get a leg up on your VxRail journey. Through this, you can have a solid foundation so that you can consume more advanced VxRail content. Here’s what I have so far in my queue:
- Understanding the importance of cluster integrity—The biggest pain point, I find, is the amount of time that infrastructure administrators spend to ensure application uptime and compliance, and looking out for the next system update. Understanding the continuously validated state of VxRail is a game changer.
- Cluster updates—Knowing what needs to be updated is critical, but the actual process of doing a system update to a cluster isn’t a walk in the park. The VxRail cluster update experience is a significant factor in your operational investment.
- Maintaining cluster integrity—VxRail has some very helpful tools to ensure that the cluster is running in an optimal state. These tools can make your administration activity much easier.
- Serviceability—There will be times when things go wrong; that’s inevitable. I want to bring focus onto how VxRail can make this part of the experience as streamlined as possible. Current clusters feature phone-home capabilities that provide a massive benefit to the support experience.
- Extensibility—While this might be a bit on the advanced side, it’s good to know that VxRail is designed to be managed efficiently at scale. Whether your concern is deployment complexity or scaling up the management experience, this will be a good read.
Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be posting blogs about these topics. Stay tuned! For those new to VxRail, I hope I can provide a great start to your VxRail journey. Feel more than welcome to reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn. If you have suggestions for other topics that you’d like covered, I’d be more than happy to hear them.