VxRail sits at the forefront of a fundamental shift in IT infrastructure consumption – away from application specific, "build-your-own" infrastructure and toward virtualized, general-purpose, engineered systems. Dell EMC and VMware have embraced this shift with the VxRail hyper-converged appliance. VxRail has a simple, scale-out architecture that leverages VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN to provide server virtualization and software-defined storage.
To take full advantage of the VxRail solution, one must carefully consider the network that not only connects multiple nodes into a single, cohesive cluster but also enables connectivity to the customer’s IT environment. Numerous industry studies have shown that networking is the primary source of both deployment issues and poor performance of hyper-converged solutions. In most cases, VxRail clusters (minimum of three and maximum of 64 nodes) connect to a pre-existing IP network at the customer site. The inclusion of dedicated switches for the VxRail cluster simplifies this process and avoids many of the pitfalls associated with the deployment of a hyper-converged solution that originates in network connectivity
deployment of a VxRail cluster when a pair of dedicated Dell EMC Networking switches is purchased with the cluster. This document covers the process of connecting a cluster of VxRail nodes to:
- A pair of Dell Networking switches configured for Virtual Link Trunking (VLT). Using VLT is the preferred topology.
- A pair of Dell Networking switches not configured for VLT.
- A single Dell Networking switch.
This document provides switch topology options and configuration examples for a VxRail 4.5 cluster using nodes built on 14th generation (14G) PowerEdge servers. Nodes in these examples use 25GbE network adapters. Switches in this guide use Dell EMC Networking OS10 Enterprise Edition (OS10EE).
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