DavidRing.ie

EHC (Enterprise Hybrid Cloud) which is the DellEMC turnkey VMware (vRealize Suite) based cloud offering has made great strides in recent releases transforming the cloud strategy for CPSD CI/HCI, namely EHC on VxBlock/VxRack Flex/VxRail (Engineered, manufactured, managed, supported and sustained as one product) and this release is no different with massive improvements around automation especially in relation to both the Install and Upgrade process associated with the EHC platform on VxRail leading to far quicker and more seamless deployments of the EHC stack. Enhanced multi-site capabilities, DRaaS offering on VxRail and factory delivered EHC on VxRack Flex w/NSX are some of the biggest milestones with this release.

In addition to the EHC full management stack the EHC Automated Install Tool (AIT) can now as part of the EHC 4.1.2 release deploy the VxRail EndPoint management stack, data protection (avamar & datadomain), RP4VM and configure cross vCenter NSX & VxLAN.

Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud on VxRail – Accelerated Install Demo

Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Automated Upgrade Demo

EHC 4.1.2 offers greater EHC on VxRail scalability, including support for up to 4x EHC Managed vCenter EndPoints along with BaaS support at each of the managed endpoints. DRaaS leveraging RP4VM protection will be supported between managed endpoints as well as for the VxRail hosting the CMP.  Each VxRail endpoint has it’s own internal vCenter Server.

DRaaS scalability increases greater than two-fold with the adoption of RP4VM v5.0.1.2, resulting in support for the protection of 5K VMs in a vCenter Pair (previous was 2K), 50 vRPA Clusters (previous was 8) and support the max of 64 nodes in a Tenant Pod cluster (previous was 32).

Dual Site VxRail DRaaS:

Note: The VxRail Appliance does not use STaaS in EHC 4.1.2 because all vSAN storage on the VxRail Appliance is pre-provisioned at deployment time.

Inclusion of E,S & V series VxRail models in addition to the initial ‘P’ series model (supported since EHC 4.1.1) will be supported at each of the EHC 4.1.2 managed endpoints. EHC on VxRail resides on a single appliance using a single ESXi cluster (4-64 nodes) hosting all EHC CMP (Cloud Management Platform) and Tenant workload components, the EHC Pod functions (Core, NEI, Automation & Tenant Workloads) are separated by Resource Pools (configured by AIT).

Another huge milestone is the support for VxRACK SDDC as part of the EHC ‘Dozer’ release (Code name for ‘EHC 4.1.2’) and introduces closer alignment with VMware SDDC/vCF (VMware cloud foundation) in terms of vSphere, NSX and vSAN, with vRealize component alignment evolving over the course of future releases.

Platform Updates:

EHC v4.1.2 ESSM supports the following CI/HCI RCMs&ESSM: Updated RCM(Release Certification Matrix) support covering RCM 6.0.5-6.0.16 on VxBlock (340,350,540&740-VMAX 950 support included), RCM 3.2.2 on VxRACK Flex and VxRAIL ESSM 4.0.301.

We have both an ESSM for VxBlock&VxRack Flex and an ESSM for VxRail which is essentially same as VxBlock without all things not required on VxRail such as ViPR..

–vSphere v6.0 Update 3b

–vRealize Automation v7.3 (With the introduction of vRA 7.3 brings with it public Cloud support for Azure.)

–vRealize Orchestrator v7.3

–NSX v6.2.7

–vRealize Operations Manager v6.5

–vRealize Log Insight v4.3

–vRealize Business v7.3

–Site Recovery Manager v6.1.2

–SQL Server 2014 SP2 support (DB server for vCenter and vRA)

–Dell EMC ViPR v3.6.0.2

–Dell EMC RP4VM v5.0.1.2

–Dell EMC Avamar v7.4.1

–VxBlock RCM v6.0.16

–VxRack Flex RCM v3.2.2

–VxRail 4.0.301

Note: As the versions stated above may change over time please refer to the latest online revision of the EHC ESSM (EMC Simple Support Matrix) which is updated at the end of every month with the latest additions/changes validated through qualification. Any changes are documented in the appendix section at the bottom of the ESSM, the main section of the ESSM does not change from GA.

EHC 4.1.2 References: