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Hyper Converged: Made Easy with Dell EMC and VMware

Dell EMC and VMware continue to excel at integrating hardware and software

New VxRail offers 50% faster all flash performance and 35% reduction in latency, compared to previous generations

Hyper Converged is here to stay and VMware is leading the way

A Simpler Solution

From the start, we saw how well VMware and Dell EMC have integrated hardware and software. This enables them to offer a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) in what feels like an appliance. Using vCenter, you can control the storage, networking, and compute. Even more impressive, the same vCenter can also control VMware on AWS. For anyone who has deployed VMware on AWS, you’ll notice that the interfaces are similar.

New VxRail Much Faster that Predecessor

New VxRail has a 50% faster all flash performance and 35% latency reduction over the previous Gen 13th model. An in-kernal vSAN, allows you to control all aspects of storage and network maintenance in the VMware software. You can bypass the latency you would have with separated HCI. Other manufacturers “offer” solutions with their software in between, but this is as close to a complete simple solution that we have seen.

A More Convenient, Streamlined Option

Working with the software tools, it became apparent that a VMware administrator can allocate storage and configure the network right through the VMware interface. In fact, you couldn’t allocate resources without having storage and network resources available (nice warning windows popped up). The new line of VxRail and VxRack from Dell EMC even ships preloaded with all VMware software ready to be configured out of the box. Support, upgrades and maintenance are all combined.

FTEI-VxRail-infographic

Final Thoughts

This is truly a Hyper Converged / SDDC solution. Using NSX, vSAN, vSphere, vCenter and now VxRail Manager (that is just a shortlist of the included VMware software) you can do just about everything on VMware as you can on AWS.

Most importantly since we are all HCI and SDDC with VMware you can move workloads between your on-prem to the AWS VMware instances as if they were just another VMware Data Center. I am excited to see what VMware is doing and anticipate additional functionalities, such as HA, to come shortly.

Everything else you know about VMware instances is technically possible. In June, VMware and AWS announced support for Horizon View and VDI on AWS.

Hyper Converged is here to stay. And VMware is firmly seated at the head of the class.

Download the complete Cloud Connect: Local Data Center Can Serve a Local Cloud whitepaper here.