Dell VxRail

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
	G Series	E Series	V Series	P Series	S Series
Form Factor	2U4N	1U1N	2U1N	2U1N	2U1N
Cores	4 - 56	4 - 56	8 - 56	8 - 56	4 - 56
Memory	64 GB - 2048 GB	64 GB - 3072 GB	128 GB - 3072 GB	64 GB - 3072 GB	64 GB - 3072 GB
Hybrid Storage Capacity	1.2 TB - 12 TB SAS	1.2 TB - 19.2 TB SAS	1.2 TB - 48 TB SAS	1.2 TB - 48 TB SAS	4 TB - 48 TB SAS
All-Flash Storage Capacity	1.92 TB - 19.2 TB SAS or 1.92 TB - 19.2 TB SATA	1.92 TB - 30.7 TB SAS or 1.92 TB - 30.7 TB SATA	1.92 TB - 76.8 TB SAS or 1.92 TB - 76.8 TB SATA	1.92 TB - 76.8 TB SAS or 1.92 TB - 76.8 TB SATA	Hybrid only
Use Cases	General-purpose for broad hyper-converged use cases	Basic for remote office, stretch cluster or entry workloads	Graphics-ready for uses such as high-end 2D/3D visualization	High-performance optimized for heavy workloads such as databases	Capacity-optimized with expanded storage for collaboration, data, and analytics

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.