As containerization is exploding in many data centers, Dell Technologies is continuing to assist customers on their DevOps adoption journey by developing infrastructure solutions that can act as the foundation for running their modern containerized business applications. These hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and storage solutions are called DevOps-ready platforms. VxRail is included in the DevOps-ready platform family as a scalable HCI integrated system infrastructure solution with automated lifecycle management that eases the IT operations experience and helps speed up the delivery of infrastructure resources to developers, thus enhancing their DevOps end-user experience.

While it is important to have DevOps-ready infrastructure to underpin an organization’s DevOps adoption journey, a solution is not complete without implementing a cloud native container orchestration platform, such as Kubernetes, on top. SUSE Rancher is used as a Kubernetes management platform that is open-source. Together, SUSE Rancher and VxRail enables customers to implement a multi-cloud deployment strategy and ensure that their organizations can more effectively control resource costs and adhere to corporate governance mandates while maintaining the flexibility of cloud operations on-premises.

VxRail is the only fully integrated, pre-configured, and tested HCI system optimized with VMware vSphere, making it ideal for customers who want to leverage SUSE Rancher through vSphere to create and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises. VxRail has a proven hyperconverged infrastructure that allows VM’s creation for traditional workloads for apps not ready to be containerized. As a result, SUSE Rancher can potentially reduce the number of operating systems and virtual machines created or installed. Additionally, SUSE Rancher on VxRail can also enable IT operations to control the management of VxRail while giving DevOps the ability to build or manage their own containers via the SUSE Rancher interface. Running SUSE Rancher on VxRail delivers a seamless and automated operations experience across cloud-native and traditional workloads.

SUSE Rancher is the K8s cluster management part of the SUSE portfolio and Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE2) is the Kubernetes runtime component.  SUSE Rancher is the complete enterprise computing platform to run Kubernetes clusters on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. One hundred percent open-source software with zero lock-ins, SUSE Rancher fits in perfectly with your multi-cluster, hybrid, or multi-cloud container orchestration strategy. A recently published solution brief shows work effort conducted by the Dell Customer Solution Center engineering team validating the deployment of SUSE Rancher and RKE2 on VxRail and highlights the better together experience customers can get with SUSE Rancher and RKE2 on VxRail.

The Dell Customer Solution Center allows customers to experience Dell’s end-to-end solutions portfolio with a personalized engagement with Dell customer solution center engineers. These engagements are designed to help customers identify and solve their business challenges by utilizing Dell Technologies solutions to optimize the innovation within their organizations. Customer Solution Center services range from proof of concepts to technical deep dive conversations and presentations and more. Customers can work with these Dell Technologies experts in our dedicated labs or remotely from any location with the latest showcases of our offerings. For more information on the Dell Customer Solution Center, see https://www.delltechnologies.com/csc

As part of the solution validation, the solution center engineering team deployed SUSE Rancher and RKE2 in various ways, using a single node as well as a multi-node deployment and using both automated and manual installations processes. This effort was performed using the instructions found in the SUSE Rancher user documentation. As a result, the team could confirm the ease of deployment of the platform.

Deploying SUSE Rancher is as easy as following the documentation. This documentation can be found on the SUSE Rancher website and provides straightforward information about initial installation requirements. SUSE Rancher can be freely downloaded and installed on your VxRail infrastructure. A SUSE Rancher support subscription is available for purchase through Dell Technologies.

VxRail is a Dev-Ops ready platform that can work with traditional workloads and container based orchestrators such as SUSE Rancher and RKE2. In addition, SUSE Rancher and RKE2 provide a Kubernetes platform that addresses operational and security challenges. Together, VxRail and SUSE Rancher make it easy for businesses to standardize both IT and developer operations on-premises and in the public cloud and accelerate their Dev-Ops adoption journey.

VxRail Resources

• VxRail Hyperconverged Infrastructure
• VxRail System TechBook

Dell Technologies Resources

• Customer Solution Centers
• Running SUSE Rancher and RKE2 on Dell VxRail Solution Brief

SUSE Rancher Resources

• SUSE Rancher Documentation
• Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2 (RKE2) Documentation 
• SUSE Fleet Container management and deployment engine
• SUSE Rancher GitHub

Author information

Vic Dery, Senior Principal Technical Marketing Engineer 

Vic.Dery@dell.com

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