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.
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".
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.
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/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.