Scaling Up VxRail: Managing an Ecosystem
Tue, 08 Nov 2022 20:13:27 -0000
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This is the sixth article in a series introducing VxRail concepts.
The engineering team behind VxRail has done a fantastic job building cluster and life cycle management tools into our software. The cluster update process is an excellent example of one of these software enhancements. However, we need to go further. The value of these enhancements decays a bit as you have more and more clusters, resulting in more and more actions required to manage an environment. This end result is antithetical to the entire idea behind VxRail. However, this complexity reintroduction never occurs, thanks to the features and functionality of the VxRail API and CloudIQ. The API scales out management operations by providing access to many of the same software calls that VxRail makes. Then we have CloudIQ. CloudIQ is a cloud-based management utility that can interface with various Dell infrastructures that VxRail uses to improve cluster management as environments scale out.
Expanding and automating your VxRail environment
For readers that aren’t familiar with what APIs are, the acronym stands for “Application Programming Interface.” APIs exist to help two, or sometimes more, pieces of software communicate with each other. VxRail has its own API that works in conjunction with VMware APIs and the Redfish API for the iDRAC and hardware. This enables the management of hardware and both VMware and VxRail software at scale. The VxRail API Guide shows the full range of calls available to developers. There are dozens of them; the last number I saw was over 70 individual calls. Now, there’s more to the API than its comprehensive nature. It also brings with it the simplicity of use. The API can be taken advantage of using the Swagger web interface and a PowerShell module to provide simple command line interfaces that IT staff are familiar with.
The API can help customers of any size, but who I see that benefits the most from using an API is a large customer that might have tens to hundreds of nodes in many clusters. The scale of these environments creates a need for further automation that can link VxRail clusters with management tools and practices. Some use-case examples include items like node discovery to see what various hardware is available and the versions running on that hardware; another example would be something like examining node and cluster health throughout the data center. The API can also enable infrastructure-as-code projects, such as automatically spinning up and winding down clusters as needed. Even automating simple tasks, like the shutdown of clusters in a way that maintains data consistency, provides a massive value to VxRail customers.
CloudIQ: Helping Manage Your Ecosystem
VxRail has more than the API to aid in managing large environments. As great as the API is, it takes a bit of preparation to use, whereas CloudIQ is ready for use as soon as Secure Connect Gateway is enabled and clusters are enrolled. If you haven’t heard of CloudIQ, I recommend checking out the CloudIQ simulator. The simulator doesn’t provide access to the complete feature set of CloudIQ but makes for an excellent introduction to what the product can do.
CloudIQ is a cloud-based application that monitors and resolves problems with Dell storage, server, data protection, networking, HCI, and CI products, and APEX services. You might see CloudIQ referred to as an AIOps application. This is short for artificial intelligence for IT operations. In the case of VxRail, this data is sent in by customers’ clusters using Secure Connect Gateway, where CloudIQ can then perform analytics functions. The output of this analytics can be used to create custom reports, create various estimates on storage utilization, reduce IT risk, and recover from problems faster. Beginning in May and continuing into June, Dell ran a survey of CloudIQ users. These users were able to accelerate IT recovery as little as 2x to as much as 10x faster, which saved them about an entire workday per week, on average. CloudIQ provides all this to customers with no financial or IT overhead due to it being freely available for use by Dell customers connecting to the Dell cloud.
Conclusion
Growth is exciting, but it comes with new challenges, and old ones don’t go away—they get bigger. VxRail provides customers with an API designed to work with the iDRAC and VMware APIs to provide automation throughout the entire cluster stack. This helps customers reduce repetitive labor tasks and create infrastructure-as-code projects. Then with CloudIQ, IT staff can get a view of their Dell infrastructure equipment from one pane of glass. For VxRail, this would include software versions, cluster health scores, the ability to initiate updates, and other functionality. While the API offers most of its value to customers with very large VxRail footprints, most all customers can also benefit from CloudIQ to view multiple clusters as well as the remainder of their Dell infrastructure equipment.