VMware: Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 – A Few Notes

VxRail 4.5 was announced in May by Dell EMC and I’ve been a bit slow in going through my enablement on the platform. The key benefit (beyond some interesting hardware permutations that were announced), is support for VMware vSphere 6.5 U1 and vSAN 6.6. I thought I’d cover a few of the more interesting aspects of the VxRail platform and core VMware enhancements.

Note that VxRail 4.5 does not support Generation 1 hardware, but it does support G2 and 3 Quanta models, and G3 Dell PowerEdge appliances.

VxRail Enhancements

Multi-node Additions

Prior to version 4.5, adding an additional node to the existing cluster was a bit of a pain. Only one node could be added at a time and this could take some time when you had a lot of nodes to add. Now, however,

• Multiple nodes (up to 6) can be added simultaneously.
• Each node expansion is a separate process. If one fails, the remaining five will keep going.

There is now also a node removal procedure, used to decommission old generation VxRail products and migrate to new generation VxRail hardware. This is only supported for VxRail 4.0.301 and above and removal of only one node at a time is recommended.

Network Planning

Different VLANs are recommended for vSAN traffic and for management across multiple VxRail clusters.

VxRail network topologies use dual top-of-rack (ToR) switches to remove the switch as a single point of failure.

Read the entire article here, Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 – A Few Notes

Via the fine folks at VMware!