Hyperconverged systems are a set of physical servers running in a cluster that provides compute, storage and networking all in one. Over the past few years, hyperconverged system have been on the rise in popularity due to the highly scalable and ease of management with businesses. It is backed by VMWare's vSAN technology. IT administrators like it because these features are delivered by a single vendor but more importantly, the upgrade process is easy without much thought needing to research for firmware vs software and driver compatibility. To scale the hyperconverged system (compute or storage), you can just add a new node/server to the cluster.
The VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance from Dell/EMC. There are different versions of VxRails depending on your need for cpu, memory and size/number of disks. The underlying hardware architecture are just their PowerEdge line of servers. On the network side, it supports configurations of 1gb, 10gb or 25gb connecting to two top of rack switches for redundancy. On the storage side, you can either go all Flash or Hybrid of SSD and HDD's. But in order to do the minimum of FTT=1, at least 3 host is required.
VxRail Node Comparisons
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G Series
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E Series
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V Series
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P Series
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S Series
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Form Factor
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2U4N
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1U1N
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2U1N
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2U1N
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2U1N
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Cores
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4 - 56
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4 - 56
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8 - 56
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8 - 56
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4 - 56
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Memory
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64 GB - 2048 GB
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64 GB - 3072 GB
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128 GB - 3072 GB
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64 GB - 3072 GB
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64 GB - 3072 GB
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Hybrid Storage Capacity
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1.2 TB -
12 TB SAS
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1.2 TB -
19.2 TB SAS
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1.2 TB -
48 TB SAS
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1.2 TB -
48 TB SAS
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4 TB -
48 TB SAS
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All-Flash Storage Capacity
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1.92 TB -
19.2 TB SAS
or
1.92 TB -
19.2 TB SATA
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1.92 TB -
30.7 TB SAS
or
1.92 TB -
30.7 TB SATA
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1.92 TB -
76.8 TB SAS
or
1.92 TB -
76.8 TB SATA
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1.92 TB -
76.8 TB SAS
or
1.92 TB -
76.8 TB SATA
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Hybrid only
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Use Cases
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General-purpose for broad hyper-converged use cases
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Basic for remote office, stretch cluster or entry workloads
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Graphics-ready for uses such as high-end 2D/3D visualization
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High-performance optimized for heavy workloads such as databases
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Capacity-optimized with expanded storage for collaboration, data, and analytics
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Deployment:
The deployment is done by Dell engineers with their Pro Deploy or Pro Deploy Plus package. I don't believe you can purchase it without those packages. On the technical side, the engineer will run their network assessment tool to determine if everything is accessible. Any issues that come up on the network assessment tool will generally need to be resolved before moving forward with the install. If everything passes, the idrac ip will be set up via a console connection for each host in your cluster by using the racadm tool. Logging into the console on the first host, the management IP is configured and the VxRail Manager VM will be powered on. Once the VxRail Manager is powered on, the engineer will go through the GUI which will ask a series of questions concerning IP, hostnames and passwords to your vCenter environment. From that information, the rest of the hosts in your cluster will be deployed and configured automatically.
Licensing and Software:
-With each VxRail purchase, you get the following:
VxRail Manager
ESRS
VMWare vCenter
VMWare Log Insight
EMC RecoverPoint
Upgrade process:
The upgrade process is rather simple. This is done from the VxRail Manager. You can either do an upgrade via the internet or a local upgrade for those who have slow internet access. This is will download the new VxRail package, unzip it and prep it for upgrading. Upgrading, of course, is not intrusive to the VM's in the cluster. Each host is upgraded one at a time while your VM's vMotions off to another host during the process. From my experience, each host takes about 40mins to upgrade depending what level of a jump you're moving to.
