CTO Advisor VxRail Proof of Concept - The pre-sales call
Transcript
[Music] hey how's it going it's keith townsend principal of the cto advisor and we have another sponsored piece of content and a series of content with dale talking about vxrail i want to set the stage for you first we've bought vxrail into the cto advisor environment and we have specific problems we'll get into that set of problems with uh jeremy merrill who's uh part of the engineering staff over at dell technologies and basically we're going to put their claims to the test over the next few
videos starting now with this introduction to vxrail from the executive perspective i'm playing the role of the executive and jeremy's going to try and make the sale of why we should at least bring in vxrail as a poc to solve our problems jeremy welcome to the show hey thanks keith appreciate it happy to be here so that's probably gonna be the nicest thing that i say to you for the rest of the uh interview this is a little bit different than what we do typically so
jeremy i'm going to lay out to you what our problems are we're for the most part happy vmware vsphere customers we're running this vsphere 6.7 on some dell 730xds vsan has been a rock solid platform for us in the cto advisor hybrid infrastructure sponsored by intel by the way however uh we're finding what most enterprises find which is technical debt associated with running vsan without any automation or tools around that around upgrades so we've been kind of stuck on vsphere 6.7 because we don't want to
spend the time doing the pre-work in engineering needed to move to 7.0 etc and get all the goodness that's vsphere 7 with kubernetes support etc etc so why should we take a look at vxrail as a solution to these specific problems so it's a great question keith i think when you look at it vxrail being a co-engineered solution between dell and vmware really allows us to bring the best of both worlds in together into the solution right so being able to leverage the poweredge server platform
along with vmware and vsan as the hypervisor and the software defined storage layer allows us to bring those together and then what we do with vxrail is we wrap around the automation to help facilitate some of the challenges that you alluded to right one of those being upgrading from 6.7 to 7.0 or even just standard upgrades within six seven you know update one to update two to update three so on and so forth and that's really when we look at what vxrail is bringing to market
is the ability to do that full stack lifecycle management of the hardware and the software all at once so i'm going to challenge you right off the bat with that because my team has told me you know what keith if you were going with vsan ready nodes we wouldn't be having some of the problems that we had we went with 730 xds which weren't on the hardware compatibility list for vsan initially we had to add the right controller we had the right at the right set
of drives like i literally went through this problem buying the wrong spec at the beginning but we eventually got it into compliance why not just go with vsan ready nodes so it's a great question when we look at vsan ready nodes they kind of give you that off-the-shelf experience of really avoiding the situation you found yourself in where you you know you had some components they weren't on the hcl so you had to do certain upgrades and things along those lines with vxrail everything's already on
the hcl now on top of that what else we're also able to bring as part of that upgrade is that hardware lifecycle management piece so with vsan ready nodes it's fairly simple and easy to update esxi but when we start looking at bios and network firmware and network card drivers and those sorts of things that tends to be where the challenges start to to mount up against an administrator and so with vxrail we put out a composite package as we refer to it and that composite
package will do a full stacked upgrade of not just esxi vsan but it's also going to be upgrading the bios the idrac updates firmware and driver updates to what we refer to as a continuously validated state so you already know that we've tested you know those various combinations of the hardware and software updates for you as an end user so you don't necessarily have to go track all that information back so i can attest that we've had this challenge we literally updated the bios on our
730 xds a few months ago and we had one we have to find them then we need to make sure we're doing the right bios find the biosis for the drives the uh servers themselves and different add-on components such as nic cards etc to just make sure that we're across the board compliant however what you're telling me is very similar to the story that i'm hearing from dale's competitors what i'm hearing from their competitors that as vmware opens up the ecosystem around vmware cloud foundation that
i'll have similar capabilities with those systems what am i missing from a unique dell technology story line yeah so one of the key things there is that when we look at vxrail and even we bring cloud foundations on top of vxrail is that both of those solutions are still co-engineered between dell emc and vmware where when you look at some of the integrations with other vendors out there it's more of a framework that those vendors can tie into so it's not quite going to have the
same end-to-end ability that we have with regards to upgrades and life cycle management as compared to some of those other third-party vendors that are out there so we'll put those claims to test in later videos i think that that's pretty easy to validate what how tight is that you guys are giving us a full access to uh some vxrail systems inside of your ebc's which was actually a pretty cool process we'll go into that uh in a later video however again more pushback on this experience
beyond life cycle management when i hear the term life cycle management i think about the unique problems that i'm in but one of the other challenges that we have experienced we've briefed deeply of vmware cloud foundation in the form of its cousin vmc on aws we did a uh review of vmc on aws we really liked it as part of our overall architecture for bringing in more capacity that experience that cloud-like experience is something that we really desire inside of our data center how does vxrail
help get us closer to that experience inside of our data center so with that one i think the key thing here is what you had mentioned previously is around cloud foundations right so what we've done is we've taken that co-engineering effort between dell emc and vmware with vxrail and extended it into cloud foundations so when you actually go out and purchase and deploy a cloud foundation solution there's a specific option to say i am deploying this on top of the x-ray that now makes sddc manager
which is one of the main components in cloud foundation it makes sddc manager aware of vxrail manager so now you're able to continue with that full hardware software lifecycle management that you would experience in a standalone or a standard vxrail cluster and extend that out into cloud foundations so now sddc manager when it's going out to upgrade your on-premises private cloud with nsx and the vrealize suite and vcenter when it comes time to do the esxi components is actually making an api called a vxrail manager
so now you've got that one main interface of sddc manager to update your your entire on-premises cloud itself so tell me a little bit more about this secret sauce that you guys have with the vmware team one of the things that i really found interesting when talking to the vmware team about vmc on aws was the co-engineering that they did with aws for ec2 drivers for storage when storage is presented they're not presenting the nvme drivers up to vcenter they're presenting this generic overlay so that
the the aws guys can plug in any other types of storage what other api calls can i make like specifically around your dell emc what around storage and or data protection are you guys offering me any additional value other than being able to provision vsan so vxrail manager is really one of the main components within a vxrail solution it helps as we've talked about with life cycle management but when i when i look at life cycle management myself it's not just upgrades right so it's adding
drives it's replacing drives it's adding nodes into the system it's even helping from a support perspective and so vxrail manager is a plug-in into vcenter itself and that's how you can do a lot of the administration of the vxrail side of things now one of the main things that we've been focusing on around vxrail over the last couple years is building out those public apis so that those customers that may not want to leverage the plug-in directly into vcenter and they'd much rather make it those
calls through api calls they have that flexibility that also allows us to open this up those apis up to other use cases one of those obviously being cloud foundations and sddc manager being able to communicate with vxrail manager so that way we do bring that flexibility into those customer environments that desire that so jeremy you know we're going to put all your claims to the test we have a very extensive set of test plans or test scripts that we're going to run against the vxrail system
that you're going to give us we're going to test deploying the initial system all the way through this life cycle management and api access to the apis directly from vcenter and directly frankly to vxrail manager i'm sure you folks will do well on the test if not you know what i now have your number and you might be getting a support call from me yeah absolutely looking forward to it i think you'll be very impressed with what you see well jeremy i appreciate you standing in
a in the hot zone i'm sitting you're standing so i can't say you're sitting in the hot seat you're standing in the hot zone these have been some pretty tough questions i didn't prep you for any of these questions uh and just like you're giving us the system without any guard rails you're just saying have at it my engineers if there's something to be found they'll find it if there's value that you weren't able to state we'll find and state that value at the end of
this series and as part of the report you want to learn more about this effort with dale technologies you can follow us on the web the forward slash ctoadvisor.com tech and you'll see this whole story line being played out over the next few weeks or you can reach out to me directly dms are open on twitter at cto advisor talk to you next cto dose
