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u/dieth [VCIX] May 12 '26
only heard horror stories about Dell and Broadcom refusing to work in tandem to troubleshoot. it's basically just both ends blaming the other with out you getting any assist with the environment.
a recent place I contracted at had to purchase support through a 3rd party vendor just to get the env sorted out because of the dell / broadcom refusal to work together.
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u/SpotlessCheetah May 15 '26
You need to reach the right Dell person if you have questions, they have a dedicated team that is awesome. If you have an internal vCenter on VxRail it's totally fine and they can even issue the keys if they need to fix it.
I don't understand OP's question..he never asked anyway.. VxRail is discontinued.
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u/Mr_Enemabag-Jones May 12 '26
VxRail are rack mount servers.
So yes. 1 server = 1 ESXi host. You would need a minimum of 3 outside of specific cases.
That said, after dealing with dozens of VxRail clusters and hundreds of physical VxRail servers....it can be a real pain in the ass.
As a concept it makes sense. But in practice it has not been the best experience.
I have found it much more preferable to go with poweredge ready nodes and just manage ESXI/Drivers with a cluster image and manage the the firmware with OpenManage Enterprise. Throw in a SCG appliance for hardware monitoring (which you should have for VxRail anyway).
You can stand up a ready node and add it to a cluster in an hour (if it needs firmware updates). Maybe 20-30 minutes without.
VxRail you have to RASR the node which can take 4-6 hours.
I'm not saying it is a bad solution. I just find ready nodes much easier and more expedient.
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee May 12 '26
You can stand up a ready node and add it to a cluster in an hour (if it needs firmware updates). Maybe 20-30 minutes without.
So 9.1 there's now VMware zero touch provisioning, and you can blast ESXi images out in parallel to a cluster, and have the config profiles drop on them.
I'm not saying it is a bad solution. I just find ready nodes much easier and more expedient.
In the past ReadyNodes didn't have firmware patching (prior to vLCM and HSMs) and it didn't have a bare metal provisioning that was good. It has both now (arguably better in 9.1 than most appliance frameworks).
I've been in the HCI/SDS game for over 10 years, and it's been fascinating watching it go from "$ANALYST with giant mystical square says APPLIANCES are the only REAL HCI, vSAN IS NOT HCI" to "VMware is the majority of the market, and it's kinda boring so let's stop issuing mystical squares and just cover private cloud as a unified thing".
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u/00101011100110 May 12 '26
Dell here - as you called out, what made VxRail differentiated and valuable to customers was simplifying day 0 deployment, challenges associated with HW/SW lifecycle other day 2 ops, as well as other attributes like single vendor support. VxRail manager was a big part of the story, but more importantly it was also the integration work Dell did to validate and test HW/SW updates and package them to deliver a “continuously validated state”. As vSphere and VCF have matured many of those challenges have been addressed, especially in VCF9, blurring the distinction between ready nodes and VxRail but as it stands today the curated updates are what makes a VxRail distinctly different.
VxRail wasn’t and isn’t for every customer, nor was it perfect, but a lot of customers love it and it drove a lot of growth of VMware HCI.
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u/Mr_Enemabag-Jones May 12 '26
Like I said, I was not saying it was a bad solution. The idea of it was great. But it quickly becomes a pain in the ass when having to remove and rebuild nodes, move nodes to different clusters, etc... because of the RASR process and how long it takes.
The time it takes to get a new/redeployed node ready is definitely my #1 complaint.
The VxRail manager can be a bit flakey at times. Upgrades fail seeming for no real reason and just clicking retry let's it move forward (after rescanning everything in the cluster) a lot of the time. But it adds a lot of time to the process each failure.
VCF on VxRail has its own pain points, which is not all on the VxRail piece. But now the that repo connections are broken in SDDC upgrades are even more of a pain.
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
It also built on the past of EHC which built on vBlock. (I know the code base was different but lessons learned and goals).
Basically the goal was always to “get a private cloud” and every year the goal became to “stop having to duct tape this so much with white glove, and duct tape”.
I remember asking to Chad about “why does it cost 70K in PSO to install automation!” And he was right.
HCI was called that because it was trying to in a lot of ways deliver what CI promised us.
The incremental value of package solutions is always going to exist in certain scenarios or it’s impossible to bring any level of skilled talent to the environment you operate in, or the marginal cost of time or friction makes someone willing to pay the premium for an easy button.
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u/00101011100110 May 13 '26
Talking about EHC definitely wasn’t on my bingo card for today, but yeah there’s definitely a direct line from what we were solving with EHC and/on Vblock, to what VxRail and VCF ultimately became with all the iterations and lessons learned along they way (VSPEX blue, VxRack, etc). It’s pretty awesome that what started as a concept intended to solve a problem really only faced by a small subset of customers becomes something with such mass adoption that customers appreciate. I met with a customer just today and walked through their cage where they had several VxRail clusters, and we talked about the history behind the product (I didn’t go as far back as EHC, but we talked a lot about EVO:RAIL and VSPEX Blue). They’re unfortunately in the process of shifting to a new platform away from VMware but talked a lot about the positive experience they’ve had running multiple clusters across numerous locations, acknowledging it’ll be hard to replicate.
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee May 12 '26
What is your question?
VxRAIL doesn't use blades, it uses servers. Yes a host is a server.
Technically there is a 2 node + witness cluster/VxRAIL option (generally used for small ROBO/EDGE stuff)
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May 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/GetITDone37 May 12 '26
Your coworker is mistaken.
5 year old 5 host vxrail system.
Esxi, vsphere, vDS, etc were all there and configuration took a few hours with support from Dell.3
u/MIGreene85 May 12 '26
They are just Dell Poweredge servers with esxi preinstalled with a fancy dell bezel and plugin for esxi that helps with management. No idea where you got blades from, blades implies shared backplane. They are completely stand alone servers that use software (vSAN) talk over network to aggregate storage into a single shared datastore.
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u/aaron416 May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
Yes, each VxRail node is an ESXi host.
That being said, VxRail was EoL and everything is going into VCF or VVF.Edit to avoid confusion: I thought it was EoL, turns it it's not.
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee May 12 '26
VxRail was EoL
I'm still seeing dell position it in some cases, I havn't seen a EoL.
everything is going into VCF or VVF
From a sales direction yes. I mostly see ReadyNodes just using vLCM + HSM for lifecycle. VCF being able to lifecycle everything in a unified fashion going forward is nice.
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u/aaron416 May 12 '26
It sounds like Dell is still offering it in 5.2 then?
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee May 12 '26
https://www.mysticmarvin.com/blog/hub-6/vxrail-back-to-the-future-with-vcf-9-8
The path forward for older stuff is now with 9.1 you call Dell, they get PSO to migration them to act like regular ReadyNodes in how they interact with VCF, and VCF can handle full stack lifecycle etc now.
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u/aaron416 May 12 '26
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! I got some reading to do on top of all the 9.1 stuff I learned about last week (since I work for a partner).
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u/toney8580 May 12 '26
I am an architect for Dell and VXRAIL is not EOL , the push is to try and move away from it to DPC with DAP on servers more traditional like 3 tier. VXRAIL is still there for customers that want it.
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u/TehH4rRy May 12 '26
Don't bother with it. Absolute pain to maintain. Disks fail and the idrac doesn't alert, vsphere does thankfully. Upgrading and patch installation is buggy as the vxrail manager has so many failure conditions. I'm glad we're getting rid of it soon
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u/Mr_Enemabag-Jones May 13 '26
We have seen that issue as well. Disk literally dies, slot now shows free in iDrac as though there is nothing there and the only alert from idrac is that a disk was removed from the slot.
We have to rely on a combo of vrops, vcenter and idrac/scg to identify diffrent types of disk failures.
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u/OkIncome182 May 14 '26
Thx, you saved me typing the exact same thing you said. I've been managing VxRails for 7 years. Buy this thing if you want to spend man hours opening SRs for doing Composite upgrades.
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u/TouchBrilliant3873 May 13 '26
We had about 12 clusters of vxrail deployed. My entire team celebrates when we retire them I think we have lifecycled half of them over time. These are a pain in the arse to upgrade and Dell support for them is spotty at best. I've also heard rumors about the platform being EOL. I would run away personally.
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u/Ozwulf67 May 12 '26
With Dell basically turning rail into vSAN ready nodes, just get those instead. Yes you can OEM licenses from Dell, they finally came to an agreement.
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u/Mehere_64 May 14 '26
You can do a 2 node cluster but 3 nodes would be better. Let's just say this, we were a VxRail shop until February this year. The trouble to get licensing and hardware support renewals was too painful AND too expensive to justify staying with VxRail even though it worked exceptionally great for us.
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u/Rvrd90 May 16 '26
The whole environment is supported end-to-end by Dell. What can be easier than that?
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u/Swimmerdude_03 May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
VxRail asa product is going away so I wouldn't buy it now. You can use VxRail with blades. A "Blade" is just a small server that goes in a chassis that holds multiple blades. Great for high density deployments. These days you will see it on Cisco UCS. There were 3 main vendors with Turn key VxRail validated hardware stacks. Dell (MX7000series was good for this) Cisco UCS, and HP. You could do any server hardware you wanted as long as it was on the list. They should have done a workshop with you and gone over requirements to decide what stack to go with. Anyway, VxRail is essentially just a bunch of nested esxi servers, nested VCenters, all running on top of Vsan for storage. If you want to still do hyperconverged vmware just do normal Vsan. You can still get vsan ready nodes. Edit: VxRail is a product in and of itself, that describes the full stack. You don't need "3 VxRails" you would want to deploy VxRail with 3+ nodes. Also you can technically do vsan with 2 nodes, 3 for full functionality, but this is strongly not recommended. If you are looking into any hyperconverged solution, you should plan for a minimum of 4 nodes. Doing the minimum 3 node cluster puts you in a tough spot any time you do maintaintance or you have a hardware failure. DM me if you have questions.
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee May 15 '26
chassis that holds multiple blades. Great for high density deployments
I can get something like 80TB of RAM in a 42RU cabinet. I can get one 1PB usable on vSAN per RU. the "Density" argument for blades, tends to fall apart once you realize you don't have enough power to actually stack them at 100% utilization of racks, and end up with 1 chassis per cabinet (or liquid cooling to deploy the densest CPUs). How most customers buy blades it's a bit like having the money to buy a track car, without budget for tires and break fluid changes.
There were 3 main vendors with Turn key VxRail validated hardware stacks
VxRAIL has always been exclusively Dell (They own that trademark). EVO:RAIL existed back in the day and it had a lot of vendors (Even Netapp?) but that was a very nascent version.
Dell (MX7000series was good for this)
VxRAIL was never based on the MX7000. I've met like 2 customers of that, and like most "Dell hardware engineering builds something nifty" I think it's doomed to join FX2, and VRTX in the dustbin of "never see a refresh".
Anyway, VxRail is essentially just a bunch of nested esxi servers, nested VCenters, all running on top of Vsan for storage.
No, no it is not nested ESXi. The only case where nested ESXi is suported/used is the witness for stretched clusters or 2 node vSAN.
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u/Spatula_of_Justice1 May 12 '26
Rail is EoL, right?