VCE VxRail Appliance Components

The VxRail Appliance architecture is a distributed system consisting of common modular building blocks that scale linearly from 1 to 16 appliances, offering up to 64 nodes in a cluster. But now let's pull apart the components and get specific about the individual hardware and software technologies found in the VxRail appliance.

The VxRail appliance has four nodes which are VCE branded servers. Each node contain compute, storage, and networking technology. But don't forget, this isn't the same technology found in other VCE converged systems. For example, all of this technology is contained in a single 2RU appliance with no storage array and no network switches.

When we look inside, the hardware includes storage drives. Each node comes with six storage drives. At product launch these were hybrid drives which combine solid-state drive (SSD) hard disk drive (HDD) technologies. Soon after, all solid state or flash drives were available for customers needing maximum performance and scaling for mission critical workloads and applications that demand low latency.

These nodes also contain compute components. Each has two Intel Xeon Processor for CPUs and as much as 512 Giga Bytes of memory or RAM. You'll also find a couple of network interface cards, or NICs, which provide connectivity to network switches which are supplied by the customer.

Full configured, the VxRail Appliance’s four nodes can contain 24 storage drives, eight CPUs, and over 2,000 GB of RAM. And for additional IT capacity, these systems can be clustered with as many as 16 appliances in a single cluster. We'll discuss this in more detail in a moment.

In addition to these hardware components, the VxRail Appliance utilizes important software components. To start with, it uses VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus for managing the virtualization environment. This incorporates the ESXi hypervisor and vCenter Server which is used to manage virtual machines, multiple ESXi hosts, templates, and VM clones.

VMware Virtual SAN is Software-defined storage which is embedded in vSphere. It is used to aggregate locally attached storage from each ESXi host in a cluster creating storage pools. This in effect produces the power of a whole SAN in a two rack unit appliance, providing a hyper-converged solution for a wide variety of applications and workloads.

VCE Vision Intelligence Operations Software is optional for VxRail systems, which as you know is software designed to manage version management and the life cycle of VCE systems.

The final component we'll discuss here, the VCE VxRail Manager, coordinates storage, network, and compute resources to help customers more quickly configure, administer, and speed the deployment of virtual machines. It provides deeper hardware awareness than is available from component element managers and is the vehicle by which alerts and notifications are displayed to the user in a simple and easy-to-understand interface. The VxRail Manager leverages the underlying VMware vRealize Log Insight software to capture events and provide real-time holistic notifications about the state of virtual applications, virtual machines, and appliance hardware. VxRail Manager also provides one-click access to EMC support and online chat from within the appliance. And in addition, it provides access to EMC knowledge base articles, to the VxRail Community for online and real-time information, and to VxRail best practices.

[jeffgover]

I think you are incorrect @1:51 about a requirement for vSphere Enterprise Plus. It can use vSphere Standard to Enterprise Plus, both supported. VDS is provided as part of VMware Virtual SAN.