Dell Technologies today launched enhanced VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) systems based on Dell EMC’s newest PowerEdge servers, with better performance and improved management and deployment.
Some models include third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, with 42 per cent more cores than previous generations, while other models feature third-generation AMD EPYC processors with up to 64 cores per processor.
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Other hardware enhancements include the optional addition of NVIDIA A40 or A100 Tensor Core GPUs in the VxRail V Series, and up to 20 per cent capacity increase in VxRail P Series, and 50 per cent more PCIe slots in the VxRail E Series.
Software
Two new management components, the configuration portal and node image management, will allow customers to self-deploy remotely on their own schedules. Dell says that it will only take five minutes to add a node to a cluster. Customers can also dynamically redeploy or reallocate nodes within clusters. They will be able to have mixed generations of nodes within a cluster; the lifecycle management software recognizes the versions of firmware and software on each generation and manages them appropriately.
“One of the key things that’s really different about this VxRail system software is that it’s really about taking the burden off of the customer and off of the user,” said Nancy Hurley, senior manager of product marketing, HCI/CI. “To have their environments in a ready state, we perform over 25,000 hours of tests on all the different components that are in both your hardware and your software to ensure that if you are doing upgrades, if you are doing patches, that everything has already been tested out, everything has already been sequenced and you can truly just push a button and do your upgrades.”
She said that the lifecycle management features will extend to components such as the NVIDIA GPUs, the console, or VMware NSX-T, which can be updated in a single upgrade cycle through the VxRail HCI lifecycle management experience.
Dynamic nodes
The new VxRail dynamic nodes are compute-only systems that make use of existing external storage by sharing vSAN storage capacity across clusters via VMware vSAN HCI Mesh. They are designed to simplify operations, better manage storage resources, and reduce costs.
VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, as a hybrid cloud infrastructure foundation, can be configured with dynamic nodes to use Dell EMC PowerStore, PowerMax or Unity XT as primary storage, so customers can scale compute and storage independently.
Availability
- VxRail systems with Intel 3rd Generation Xeon processors will be globally available in July 2021.
- VxRail systems with AMD 3rd Generation EPYC processors will be globally available in June 2021.
- VxRail HCI System Software updates will be globally available in July 2021.
- VxRail dynamic nodes will be globally available in August 2021.
- VxRail self-deployment options will begin availability in North America through an early access program in August 2021.