Users Guide

EVO:RAIL Appliance

Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO:RAIL combines Compute, Networking, Storage, and

Management resources together with VMware's industry leading infrastructure virtualization and

management products to form a radically simple hyperconverged infrastructure appliance.

Hardware

VMware and Dell have collaborated to create Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO:RAIL, the

industry’s first hyperconverged infrastructure appliance for SDDC, turned on by VMware software and

Dell architecture. The EVO:RAIL software bundle is available to Dell. Dell in turn, sells the hardware with

integrated EVO:RAIL software, and provides all hardware and software support to customers.

Each EVO:RAIL appliance has four independent nodes with:

• Two Intel® Xeon®Processor E5-2620 -v2 or v3 six-core CPUs

• 192 GB of memory

• One SAS HDD for the ESXi

™

boot device

• Three SAS 10K RPM 1.2TB HDD for the VMware Virtual SAN

™

datastore

• One 400 GB MLC enterprise-grade SSD for read/write cache

• One Virtual SAN-certified pass-through disk controller

• Two 10 GbE NIC ports (configured for either RJ-45 or SFP+ connections)

• One 1 GbE IPMI port for remote (out-of-band) management

The EVO:RAIL appliance is designed with fault-tolerance and high availability in mind, with four

independent nodes each consisting of dedicated computer, network, and storage resources:

• Four ESXi hosts in a single appliance enable resiliency for hardware failures and planned maintenance

• Two fully redundant power supplie units (PSUs)

• Two redundant 10 GbE NIC ports per node

• Enterprise-grade ESXi boot device, HDDs, and SSD

• Fault-tolerant Virtual SAN datastore

EVO:RAIL can scale out to eight appliances for a total of 32 ESXi hosts, and one Virtual SAN datastore

backed by a single vCenter Server and EVO:RAIL instance. Deployment, configuration, and management

are handled by EVO:RAIL, allowing the compute capacity and the Virtual SAN datastore to grow

automatically. New appliances are automatically discovered and easily added to an EVO:RAIL cluster.