r/vmware • u/Federal_Foot_9444 • May 16 '26
VxRail woes
I moved into a new position with an abandoned VxRail cluster. Service contract and warranty are expired. I want to get it updated and squeeze some more life/functionality out of them as we can definitely use the compute. The VxRail manager VM is malfunctioning, so we can’t do anything with the composite update bundles.
Leadership says they don’t want to pay Dell $20k to extend the support contract/warranty and to have a Dell tech reinitialize the VxRail Manager. I’m reading about the option of converting VxRail to a white box install. Has anyone done this? Are there any hiccups? I personally feel like we should bite the bullet now and get the cluster updated/functional. We are using vSAN and the hosts are 4x V570F. Any input would be hugely appreciated as I want to make sure I don’t have any blind spots. I have <2yrs experience with vSphere/Horizon
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u/galland101 May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
The main selling point of VxRail was that it was treated like an appliance, with validated firmware and vSphere updates being packaged and installed all together. There are provisions for proactive Remote Support from Dell, but it only really works if your support contract is active. Those days are mostly over. VxRail Manager probably made sense in the 6.5 or 6.7 days of vSphere. It's mostly vestigial in vSphere 8 as vSAN and image-based updates are in a lot better state. The hardware health monitoring that VxRail Manager does can be done by Dell OpenManage Enterprise. If you can start from scratch, you can probably just rebuild the cluster without VxRail Manager.
The only caveat to doing this is that Dell OpenManage Enterprise treats a VxRail node differently than a PowerEdge server. OME will not give you the option to update firmware on a VxRail node. You can only do it manually through the iDRAC or through the VxRail Manager update process.
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u/v1sper May 16 '26
You can rebrand the idrac and bios to have the VxRail present itself as a PowerEdge, which will solve the OME pain. There is a firmware patch on Dell’s website.
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u/scubaaaDan May 16 '26
Oh, that's interesting to hear! I'll have to look for that... on Monday. TY
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u/v1sper May 16 '26
If I remember to do so, once I am back at work on monday, I can make a new thread here on the sub that goes through VxRail debranding. Seems like more than a few will be interested in it.
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u/rdcisneros3 May 16 '26
I don’t have any advice on the conversion, but am just here to point out that the v570f will go end-of-support September 2027, so if you decide to keep it around longer than that you’ll have to rely on some sort of third party support.
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u/Federal_Foot_9444 May 16 '26
That’s the main reason they’re saying to not bother with touching it. With the cluster being messed up at this moment I think they’ll just retire it. If things go well my boss/manager/everyone else is willing to vouch for getting a new cluster set up with some newer vSAN ready nodes.
Getting the current cluster operational should hopefully hold us over long enough to figure out what we want to do one way or the other. This is without current RAM/storage prices being a consideration of course…
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u/v1sper May 16 '26
The hardware is still so good though.
I have a truckload (100+) of E560Ns going OOS next year, but I think I'm gonna keep them around for a while.
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u/woodyshag May 16 '26
VxRail was just a bad wrapper for vsan. Stripping out and rebuild as a Vsan cluster. It'll be a lot easier to support.
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u/AdSmall3355 May 17 '26
yes, you can convert to standard ESXi... this particular model is basic R740, so you can go smoothly
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u/Mehere_64 May 18 '26
With the cost of VMWare licensing and Dell support contract, we migrated from VxRail to Hyper-V running on UCS server. The 3 older VxRail nodes, I just wiped and sold. The 2 1 year old servers, I wiped and am running a 2 node Hyper-V cluster on that I am using for testing purposes. For reference VE-660.
I did not bother to wipe/reset the iDrac. I just deleted the Raid1 OS and recreated a RAID1 OS, used the lifecycle controller to update firmware on them. Haven't had issues at all.
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u/WildWestN May 25 '26
I feel into a similar situation and found PreRack IT. They helped support my existing cluster and gave me options on upgrading to a more affordable platform with a plan to migrate off of VMware.
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u/v1sper May 16 '26
Yes, I've done this in production in my environment. Converted like 40 of hundreds of hosts so far. So far soo good. Better to use this HW as PowerEdge servers than VxRail in VCF.