VCF on VxRail – More business-critical workloads welcome!
Mon, 29 Apr 2024 13:37:17 -0000
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New platform enhancements for stronger mobility and flexibility
February 4, 2020
Today, Dell EMC has made the newest VCF 3.9.1 on VxRail 4.7.410 release available for download for existing VCF on VxRail customers with plans for availability for new customers coming on February 19, 2020. Let’s dive into what’s new in this latest version.
Expand your turnkey cloud experience with additional unique VCF on VxRail integrations
This release continues the co-engineering innovation efforts of Dell EMC and VMware to provide our joint customers with better outcomes. We tackle the area of security in this case. VxRail password management for VxRail Manager accounts such as root and mystic as well as ESXi have been integrated into the SDDC Manager UI Password Management framework. Now the components of the full SDDC and HCI infrastructure stack can be centrally managed as one complete turnkey platform using your native VCF management tool, SDDC Manager. Figure 1 illustrates what this looks like.
Figure 1
Support for Layer 3 VxRail Stretched Cluster Configuration Automation
Building off the support for Layer 3 stretched clusters introduced in VCF 3.9 on VxRail 4.7.300 using manual guidance, VCF 3.9.1 on VxRail 4.7.410 now supports the ability to automate the configuration of Layer 3 VxRail stretched clusters for both NSX-V and NSX-T backed VxRail VI Workload Domains. This is accomplished using CLI in the VCF SOS Utility.
Greater management visibility and control across multiple VCF instances
For new installations, this release now provides the ability to extend a common management and security model across two VCF on VxRail instance deployments by sharing a common Single Sign On (SSO) Domain between the PSCs of multiple VMware Cloud Foundation instances so that the management and the VxRail VI Workload Domains are visible in each of the instances. This is known as a Federated SSO Domain.
What does this mean exactly? Referring to Figure 2, this translates into the ability for Site B to join the SSO instance of Site A. This allows VCF to further align to the VMware Validated Design (VVD) to share SSO domains where it makes sense based upon Enhanced Linked Mode 150ms RTT limitation.
This would leverage a recent option made available in the VxRail first run to connect the VxRail cluster to an existing SSO Domain (PSCs). So, when you stand up the VxRail cluster for the second MGMT Domain that is affiliated with the second VCF instance deployed in Site B, you would connect it to the SSO (PSCs) that was created by the first MGMT domain of the VCF instance in Site A.
Figure 2
Application Virtual Networks – Enabling Stronger Mobility and Flexibility with VMware Cloud Foundation
One of the new features in the 3.9.1 release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is use of Application Virtual Networks (AVNs) to completely abstract the hardware and realize the true value from a software-defined cloud computing model. Read more about it on VMware’s blog post here. Key note on this feature: It is automatically set up for new VCF 3.9.1 installations. Customers who are upgrading from a previous version of VCF would need to engage with the VMware Professional Services Organization (PSO) to configure AVN at this time. Figure 3 shows the message existing customers will see when attempting the upgrade.
Figure 3
VxRail 4.7.410 platform enhancements
VxRail 4.7.410 brings a slew of new hardware platforms and hardware configuration enhancements that expand your ability to support even more business-critical applications.
- New VxRail P580N model, features four-socket PowerEdge server platform with 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors delivering 2x the memory per system* making it the optimal VxRail platform for SAP HANA and other in memory databases. The P580N provides 2x the CPU compared to the P570/F and offers 25% more processing potential over virtual storage architecture (VSA) 4S platforms that require a dedicated socket to run VSA. See Figure 4.
- New cost-effective E560N, an all NVMe platform for read intensive applications. See Figure 4.
- New configuration choices, including Mellanox 100GBe NIC cards for media broadcast use cases, 8TB high density disk drives for video surveillance. See Figure 5.
- GPUs now available in the E Series. For the first time GPU cards are supported outside the V Series. NVIDIA T4 GPUs in 1U E series platforms for entry level AI/ML, data inferencing and VDI workloads enable customers to expand the breadth of critical business applications across VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail cloud infrastructures. See Figure 5 for the available options in VCF on VxRail configurations.
Figure 4
Figure 5
There you have it! We hope you find these latest features beneficial. Until next time…
Jason Marques
Twitter - @vwhippersnapper
Additional Resources
VxRail page on DellTechnologies.com
VCF 3.9.1 on VxRail 4.7.410 Release Notes
VCF on VxRail Interactive Demos