VMworld 2014: Exclusive Briefing: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

This exclusive session brought by VMware for vExperts was about Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and contained information and a demo about the VMware EVO:RAIL solution.

Rob Glanzman of VMware presented this session and did a great job in presentation performance, answering questions during the Q&A and made the whole session as interactive as possible.

As I tweeted about EVO:RAIL the interface and solution is very, very interesting. Primarily the user interface is something I’m really happy with. The downside is that VMware didn’t partner up with HP yet. My current employer is HP partner and will therefor not be able to deploy the EVO:RAIL solution.

To give you a good impression about the product, I have deployed a EVO:RAIL environment with the VMware Hands-On Labs to create some screenshots that you can find below. If you are at VMworld right now, you should use this link, because the one above links to the standard HOL environment (no VMworld 2014 content). The code for the lab is HOL-SDC-1428 (VMware EVO:RAIL Introduction).

At the bottom of my post you can find some Q&A and additional information about VMware EVO:RAIL.

The welcome screen!

Please read (or not) the EULA and accept

Let’s go! Pro way: Custom, easy way: Just go

Enter the name conventions of your ESXi hosts and vCenter Server

Enter the IP and VLAN details for your ESXi hosts

Create your VM networks

Enter the password details for your ESXi hosts and vCenter Server

Configure NTP, logging and proxy

Validate your configuration

The IP address of your EVO:RAIL appliance is shown

Installation starts

Steady as she goes

Configuration taking place

Almost done!

And.. we’re done!

Login to your RAIL appliance

The dashboard; nice and clean, no VMs yet!

Create a new VM. But first upload an ISO

After uploading the ISO, select a guest OS

Select a VM size. These sizes can be customized

Select one or more networks

Select a security policy

See the wizard create your VM

It’s also possible to clone an existing VM

After some cloning, I got myself three VMs with the same specs and data

The health view of the EVO:RAIL appliance, monitoring capacity and availability

Some nice detailed graphs of capacity usage

After deployment, you can still manage your environment with vCenter.

The Q&A session maybe was the most interesting part of this session as they give you a better idea about the solution build-up and what you can expect (and what not to).

Q: Is it possible to deploy the RAIL interface stand-alone and connect it with your existing vSphere or vCAC environment?
A: No, the RAIL interface is delivered as a whole with the RAIL OEM hardware. You can, however, add the EVO:RAIL vSphere environment to your vRealize Automation Center environment as a resource.

Q: Is AutoDeploy being used to deploy ESXi hosts?
A: No, a custom technique is being used.

Q: Can you buy a EVO:RAIL appliance with less than 4 nodes?
A: No, the minimum amount of nodes per appliance is 4 nodes. So when expanding, you can increase in increments of 4.

Q: Is EVO:RAIL supporting multi-site configurations?
A: Yes, but integration with for example Site Recovery Manager is not yet possible.

Q: Can traditional management tools like vSphere Web Client still be used?
A: Yes, this will be possible (also shown in my screenshots above!)

Some other notes:

• The EVO:RAIL interface is not multi-tenant
• NSX is not being used under water, so you will have to create VLANs on your physical switches for each logical network you require
• No IPv6 support
• Use cases are VDI, ROBO and Virtual Private Cloud

Thanks for reading!

For more information about VMworld see their website at vmworld.com.