Dell EMC VxRail E series - Intended Use and Audience; Introduction to Vxrail

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4 | Network Planning Guide

Intended Use and Audience

This guide discusses the essential network details for VxRail deployment planning purposes only. It also introduces best practices,

recommendations, and requirements for both physical and virtual network environments. The guide has been prepared for anyone

involved in planning, installing, and maintaining VxRail, including Dell EMC field engineers and customer system and network

administrators. This guide should not be used to perform the actual installation and set-up of VxRail. Please work with your Dell

EMC service representative to perform the actual installation.

Introduction to VxRail

Dell EMC VxRail™ Appliances are a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution that consolidates compute, storage and network

into a single, highly available, unified system. With careful planning, VxRail Appliances can be rapidly deployed into an existing data

center environment, and the end product is immediately available to deploy applications and services.

VxRail is not a server. It is an appliance based on a collection of nodes and switches integrated as a cluster under a single point of

management. All physical compute, network and storage resources in the appliance are managed as a single shared pool, and

allocated to applications and services based on customer-defined business and operational requirements.

The compute nodes are based on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. The G Series consists of up to four nodes in a single chassis,

whereas all other models based on a single node. A 10Gb Ethernet switch (or a 1Gb Ethernet switch for certain models of VxRail) is

required. A workstation/laptop for the VxRail user interface is also required.

VxRail has a simple, scale-out architecture, leveraging VMware vSphere

and VMware vSAN™ to provide server virtualization and

software-defined storage, with simplified deployment, upgrades, and maintenance through VxRail Manager.. Fundamental to the

VxRail clustered architecture is network connectivity. It is through the logical and physical networks that individual nodes act as a

single system providing scalability, resiliency and workload balance.

The VxRail software bundle is preloaded onto the compute nodes, and consists of the following components (specific software

versions not shown):

• VxRail Manager

• VMware vCenter Server™

• VMware vRealize Log Insight™

• VMware vSAN

• VMware vSphere

• Dell-EMC Secure Remote Support (SRS)/VE

Licenses are included for all components except VMware vSphere. The vSphere licenses can be purchased through Dell EMC,

VMware or your preferred VMware reseller partner.

The VxRail Appliances also includes licenses for software that can be downloaded, installed and configured:

• Dell EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines (RP4VM) - 5 Full VM Licenses per single node VxRail appliance (15 for the G

Series appliance)

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