VxRail Technical Overview – Part 1 CTO Advisor PoC
Transcript
(synthesizer whirring) >> Hey, how's it going? It's Keith Townsend, principle of the CTO Advisor. If you've been following this Dell VxRail HCI system software series, we appreciate you for joining the series. I have Thom Greene, engineer extraordinaire on the other line, Thom, how's it going? >> Hi, it's going great. How are you doing, Keith? >> Feeling pretty good. So we're going to talk about this VxRail system software, HCI system software from a higher level than I think what you and Joe and Alistair were going in the next video.
The thing I want to talk to give background as to why we're even here. We're in the CTO Advisor Hybrid Infrastructure sponsored by Intel. Thank you, Intel for sponsoring this video series along with Dell Technologies. But, in general, you built the CTO Advisor Hybrid infrastructure from a software layer. Correct? >> Yeah. So you had the bare hardware and then I took it from there. I created everything from the vSAN and the vSPHERE all the way up. " So we had to make some changes.
We had to go back and buy different drives, We had to go back and buy different hardware controllers for the storage sub systems, et cetera so that vSPHERE and vSAN wouldn't yell at us and give us alerts. So when we went to go do projects like we did when we prepared all of the VMware Cloud solutions, that we could kind of have some authority in our voice and really get as close to a enterprise deployment as possible. However, we're kind of past that point.
We're at that point where we needed to look at upgrading the system. 0 has been out for, I think over a year now. And it's safe to say, it's time to make that migration. However, and this is where Thom comes into play, I asked you for a quote on making that upgrade or doing that upgrade and you came back with a number that kind of shocked me, Thom, can you tell me why the number was so big? Why are you charging me so much?
>> Well, that number was for the friends and family rate as well. So you're lucky I like you. But no, there's a lot of work that goes into an upgrade. If you think about you're just upgrading a program like whenever you do an update for your productivity software, your office or whatever, you just download a file and it goes and installs and you're done in 10 minutes. But whenever you're doing a data center upgrade like this, it's a massive undertaking. And you have to make sure every piece is compatible with every other piece or else the upgrade's going to fail.
Even if it looked like it succeeds, it's going to fail at some point. You do a (indistinct) migration and then the virtual machine black holes itself. That's something that has happened before and you need to do a lot of research to make sure that that doesn't happen. >> And we're, full disclosure, we're using vSAN today, it's been relatively simple to manage. I can go in and do stuff in it. I try not to, but I can, if I need. I can vision a new storage pool, I can expand the existing storage inside of it, I'm capable of doing that, it's that simple of a system to manage day to day.
But when it comes to upgrade, I had some concerns. Can you walk us through some of the concerns around vSAN and kind of, I call it, on Twitter, I've be calling it having naked vSAN. >> Yeah. So whenever you're doing these upgrades, there's some very prescriptive mixtures of hardware, firmware and drives that you need to have inside your system. And so, it becomes very hard to coordinate and make sure that you have exactly the right firmware on the drive, firmware on the controller, drivers, everything.
It just becomes very, very cumbersome if you're working on a naked vSAN, as you say, or a system that you just built together yourself. >> Yeah. From a lay person's perspective, as I'm thinking through the process of upgrading the storage array versus upgrading the compute underlay, when those things are separate, it's fairly straight forward, I can upgrade my storage underlay independently, I can upgrade my compute underlay independently and make sure those things are from a high level compatible and move forward. But in this environment, like the VMs are running on the storage platform that, or the VM hypervisor platform is actually the storage platform, so if you break the storage platform, you can't independently fix the hypervisor platform.
It's all in one. So this is kind of something that had not considered. So I have an appreciation for the quote and for the friends and family discount and for the level of effort that it takes to upgrade the system. 0, which is more or less invisible to my audience. So from an executive perspective, as a business owner, I struggled with what I saw on paper. 0, I'm going to have to pay that pain point from a engineering perspective in some way.
We'll get into VCF and the HCI system software in a second. But from a practical perspective, I wanted to redeploy Thom to do something more creative. This is when our friends over at Dell Technologies reached out to us and said, "Keith, have you really looked at VxRail System Software, specifically the integration with VCF"? And this is where we engaged to kind of kick the tires on it and Thom goes with some pretty good detail on the video with Alistair and Joe after this video.
But, what caught my interest was this ability to redeploy Thom to do more interesting stuff. Thom, tell us, what does VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, and VxRail HCI Systems Software, what does that get us? >> Yeah. So VMware VCF gets you a very Cloud-like experience of running the VMware stack in your private data center. So it's very much a kind of turnkey application. You do a little bit of setup at the beginning, you hit a button and you can expand your data center.
The entire deployment is automated to the VMware validated design. So you know that the software is going to work together, it's going to be deployed correctly, as long as you have the parameters right. And so, that's why you have somebody set up the parameters. You get that going. However, if you're not using a subsystem, like a VxRail, you have to make sure that you're doing the hardware procurement and the hardware vetting yourself. So whenever you're using that VMware Cloud-like deployment experience with VCF on a platform like VxRail, you're getting a joint engineering experience.
So you've got a bunch of people at Dell, a bunch of people at VMware who are like me, or who were like your engineers, going and vetting the hardware, the software, the firmware and drivers altogether, which on an average deployment in an enterprise can save three, four weeks, maybe even months depending on how complicated the systems are. 7 deployment, 'cause we are using Dell hardware today. 0, the request that I made to you. >> Well, it frankly becomes just one click deployment.
So you just go in and say, I want to upgrade. It validates, makes sure everything is good for you and then it does the orchestration itself. So I don't even have to know what order to do things in. VCF talks to the VxRail manager and just orchestrates the hardware and software upgrades for you. So it really doesn't require anything. As long as you can trust the Dell research and you vet that out yourself, any of that's very little time to measure twice before you click that button.
>> So from a practical perspective, I would have had the value, or been able to redeploy you in the value areas that I wanted to. We want to do Tanzu research. We want to look at some of the other container platforms and think about Multicloud and operating the CTO Advisor Hybrid infrastructure in a true hybrid manner. And if we would've gotten VxRail System Software in the beginning, we would be at a place where we would prefer versus me needing to have you do this validation work.
Thom, I really appreciate you taking out the time to talk to me about the high level value of VMware Cloud Foundation and VxRail's HCI system software and how it would have benefited the CTO Advisor going forward. As we re-evaluate what we're going to do in our data center, we'll talk through some of the value and quite frankly, what you're paying up front for that value at the end for the agility, that Cloud-like ability. com/DellTech to see this entire series. If you want learn more about the CTO Advisor, you can follow me on the web @CTOAdvisor on Twitter.
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