Dell VxRail Deployment Planning Guide

The VxRail network considerations focus on availability, performance, and extensibility. VxRail is manufactured in the factory and delivered to your data center ready for deployment. The nodes in the VxRail can attach to any compatible network infrastructure to enable operations.

For more information about switch and network requirements, see the following:

• VxRail Network Planning Guide
• VxRail Architecture Overview
• VxRail Networking Guide with Dell S4148-ON Switches

Network connection speed

The following network connection speed requirements apply:

• Networking switches:
  • VxRail uses 25 GbE, 10 GbE, or 1 GbE switches for networking between cluster nodes, and between the cluster and the rest of your infrastructure.
  • Ensure that you have one or more 25 GbE, 10 GbE, or 1 GbE switches.
  • Depending on the VxRail model, VxRail also supports 100 GbE switches, on the optional PCIe adapter card.
• Ethernet ports:
  • VxRail can be deployed with 2, 4, 6 or 8 Ethernet ports per VxRail node.
  • Two or more switches support failover, or protect from the failure of a single switch for all VxRail clusters. Minimum two switch ports are required for each node.
  • For a four-node cluster, a fully populated VxRail requires eight switch ports.
  • Each VxRail compute node supports iDRAC, and iDRAC supports 1 Gb Ethernet only.

The following table provides the type of switches that are required for VxRail models:

VxRail 7.0.420 provides the following VxRail models:

• VxRail VD-4000r is a rackable chassis.
• VxRail VD-4000z is a stackable chassis.
• VxRail VD-4510c and VxRail VD-4520c are model names of compute sled.
• VxRail VD-4000w is the model name of the Witness sled.
  • The Witness sled has VMware vSphere running on it, and requires a VMware vSphere license. The VMware vSphere license is not in the order by default. Hence, the VMware vSphere license must be added (OEM), or supplied by the customer (ELA).
  • The Witness runs on the sled as a virtual appliance, and does not require a license.
  • The Witness card must be in the same chassis as the cluster hosts.
  • The Witness sled cannot be used as a shared witness for other 2-node clusters.

Cable

The following table provides cable requirements:

Data center resources

Ensure that you have the following data center resources:

• DNS server for network address resolution: VxRail supports a customer-supplied DNS, or a VxRail-supplied DNS on the VxRail Manager.
• Service connectivity support