Dell VxRail Network Planning Guide

The standard cluster is a VxRail cluster with VMware vSAN storage. You can customize VxRail nodes to provide physical compute, network, and storage resources for the cluster. Local disk drives are used on each node to form a VMware vSAN data store as the primary storage resource for application workloads. The slots are formed into a local VMware vSAN data store during cluster initialization.

In a standard VxRail cluster, VxRail nodes provide all the physical compute and storage resources to support application workload. The primary storage resource is VMware vSphere vSAN. During cluster initialization, the slots in the nodes are filled with disk drives that meet the performance and capacity requirements for the application workload, and are then formed into a local VMware vSAN data store.

The standard cluster meets the needs for most customer application workloads and common use cases. With a local VMware vSAN data store, operational flexibility addresses scalability and high availability requirements.

This cluster initialization process pools the node resources for ease of consumption. This cluster is not dependent on external storage, so all resources can be managed under a single point of management. You can expand the cluster with automated nodes and disk drives for more compute and storage resources. External storage resources can be configured on the cluster as secondary storage capacity. You can also customize nodes without local disk drives to use external data center resources for primary storage.

The VxRail cluster may cost-prohibitive for smaller business requirements. Light workloads may be a better fit for a two-node cluster or a satellite node. If the cluster is in a single site and offers support for continuous operations from a failure of components within the cluster. Zero-downtime protection from a failure of a single data center or site is not supported. A stretched VxRail cluster is a better solution for high availability requirements.

Expansion of a cluster through node addition may lead to stranded assets. Excess compute and storage resources cannot be shared outside of the cluster. For workloads that require a precise balance of compute and storage resources, a dynamic cluster may be a better fit.

VxRail also supports the following clusters:

• VxRail 2-node cluster with VMware vSAN - 2-node cluster
• VxRail dynamic node cluster - dynamic cluster
• VxRail stretched cluster with VMware vSAN - stretched cluster