The following post provides a basic UI overview of how the VxRail Appliance disk groups are configured and viewed from both the VxRail Manager and the vSphere Client.
The VxRail Appliance vSAN disk groups are configured in one of two ways:
Hybrid – single SSD disk for caching and one or more HDD disks for capacity.
All-flash – single SSD disk for caching and one or more SSD disks for capacity.
The amount of storage available to the vSAN datastore is based on the capacity drives.
A VxRail node allows for multiple disk groups (please refer to official VxRail docs for specifics, as the quantity of disk groups differ per VxRail model) which in turn provides multiple cache drives per node thus potentially improving performance. In this example each VxRail Appliance node has two All-flash disk groups, each node in the cluster is required to have the same storage configuration.
vSphere Client UI
From the vSphere client click on the cluster and navigate to the ‘configure – vSAN – General’ from here we can see that the vSAN cluster for this VxRail appliance comprises of 24 disks in total (4x 13G servers).
‘vSAN – Disk Management’ displays both the Disk Groups and the disks associated with each Disk Group. Taking the example below of the first ESXi host in the cluster, we can see the VxRail node has a total of 6 disks contributing storage to the vSAN cluster, comprising of two disk groups with three disks in each disk group. Continue reading
VxRail is built on a modular scale out clustering architecture that comprises of appliances (Base building block) where each appliance can house up to 4x industry standard x86 hardware compute nodes (four independent ESXi hosts) inclusive of storage. The appliance has a small footprint which is consuming only two rack units ‘2U’ in height, thus we will use the term ‘2U4N’ as abbreviation for the rack space and compute node count within the appliance. With the initial launch (Q1 2016) VxRail will have the ability to scale up to 8x appliances allowing for a total of 32x compute nodes (the Q2 VxRail release will allow for twice these scaling counts allowing for up to 16x Appliances resulting in a max total of 