VxRail has recently come out with a bunch of new updates and changes in the latest two code releases. VxRail VxRail 4.7.510 and now 7.0 have a bunch of usability improvements and feature changes. For example, 7.0 now gives people the ability to deploy an on-premises hybrid cloud or create a developer-ready Kubernetes platform. Here are some of the updates and changes that have come in the VxRail 4.7.510 and 7.0 releases:
VxRail Health Check (New with VxRail 4.7.510)
- Pre-upgrade health check has traditionally been integrated into overall LCM process
- User can now launch a VxRail system health check at will!
- Deal with any corrective actions
- Helps to separate any health check issues from upgrade issues
- Last successful health check date will be displayed in the pre-check/upgrade UI
- Health check will still run be invoked upon upgrade
- If failure, upgrade will not proceed
Intel Optane Persistent Memory (PMEM) (New with VxRail 4.7.510)
What is persistent memory?
- A non-volatile storage medium with RAM-like performance characteristics
- Provides “memory-like” performance
- Very low latency, high bandwidth (IOPS)
VxRail & Optane PMEM
- Ideal for larger memory footprints (ie – SAP HANA)
- Different use cases as block storage
- where data can be written and re-written persistently (ie – DBMS log files)
- Flexibility & scalability
- Start small with a single PMEM card and scale and grow as needed
App Direct mode for VxRail
- Acts as an independent memory resource
- Directly accessible by applications
- Can be consumed as byte addressable memory and as block storage
- DRAM DIMMs continue to function as system memory
- Use cases for PMEM in App Direct
- In Memory Databases / Datasets
- Real Time Analytics and Transaction Processing
- Journaling
- Massively parallel search (query) functions
- Log acceleration for traditional DBs
- Checkpoint acceleration or elimination for HPC
- Reduce recovery time
- Reduce paging
- Improve / accelerate performance
vSAN file services
- Supported use cases
- File shares for traditional and container workloads
- Mount shares to VMs
- Provision shares to containers
- File shares for traditional and container workloads
- NFS v3 and v4.1
- Hard and soft quotas
- High availability
- Requires at least 3-nodes in a cluster
- File systems deployed on multiple hosts (one is active)
- Does not use vMotion or vSphere HA
- Supported in vSAN 7.0 and later (any license edition)
- Not supported with stretched clusters or 2-node deployment
- Do not use to store VMDKs for running VMs
Entry-level four node VCF consolidated architecture for VxRail
- VxRail 7.0 went GA May 12, 2020 and is based on vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, VxRail integration with VCF delivers a simple and direct path to deliver Kubernetes at cloud scale with one, complete, automated platform.
- Available for VCF 4.0 on VxRail 7.0 only
- With networking advancements in VCF 4.0, Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is now more accessible with a four-node configuration significantly lowering the initial costs to stand up VCF on VxRail entry level cloud. It supports multiple clusters and can scale to vSphere maximums.
- Compute workloads co-reside in management workload domain.
- Can configure resource pools, shares and reservations to provide isolation between workloads and core management components.
On top of these software updates VxRail has also released some new hardware updates as well. I will cover some of these changes in a new post but some of the updates include: support for new Intel and AMD processes and a new D series node.
Great overview!