Users Guide

Deploying an appliance

Before you begin

Before you deploy XC Series Appliance and XC Core System, ensure that you read through this document and familiarize yourself with the

process and required materials.

WARNING: Before you set up and operate your appliance, review the safety instructions that shipped with your storage

enclosure.

WARNING: The weight of your appliance with all the physical disk drives installed (full weight) is 35-70 lbs.

WARNING: Your appliance must be installed by Dell EMC certied service technicians.

CAUTION: Before installing your appliance in the rack, ensure that the weight of the appliance does not exceed the weight limit

of the rack. For more information, see the Rack Installation instructions that is shipped with your appliance.

CAUTION: It is important that you complete all the tasks in this guide before doing other congurations.

NOTE: For weight stability, always load the rack by using bottom-up approach.

NOTE: This solution is deployed by Dell EMC Services.

Ensure that the following items are available:

• Power cables

• Network cables—optical and/or copper (Intel SFP+ or Category 6 Ethernet)

• Rail kit

• Nutanix documentation

• Dell EMC Documentation

NOTE

: For more information about the Dell EMC documentation and Nutanix documentation, see the Documentation matrix

section in

Dell EMC XC640 Series Hyper-Converged Appliances Support Matrix

available at Dell.com/XCSeriesmanuals.

NOTE: The Boot Optimized Server Storage (BOSS) card shipped with XC Series Appliance and XC Core System is the appliance

boot device. This PCIe card supports up to two M.2 SATA SSDs congured in RAID1 for high availability. Write intensive activities

and processes leveraged by XC Series Appliance and XC Core System, are intended to take place on the SSDs and HDDs and not

the BOSS boot device. Any applications defaulting write activity to the BOSS boot drive should be redirected accordingly.

The following are some of the examples of write intensive applications not to be run on the boot device:

• Appliance Center Agents

– System Center Conguration Manager (CCMExec.exe)

– System Center Operations Manager (MonitoringHost.exe)

• Write‐intensive Agents

• Databases

• Disk management utilities (third-party disk defragmentation or partitioning tools)

• More roles outside of the appliance’s intended use (web server, domain controller, RDS, and so on.).

• Client‐based Antivirus (Hyper-V only)

• Virtual machines: Ensure that the virtual machines run only on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and Hard Disk Drives (HDDs).

8 Deploying an appliance