The VxRail Advantage

VxRail HCI System Software and Lifecycle Management

October 2020
 Lifecycle management: Typical challenges

Overburdened Disruption Budget

IT staff to business efficiencies

• Limited resources to • Unsuccessful migrations or • Disproportionate amount of

research upgrade options & upgrades could result in resources spent on
optimal components outages or need to go back managing infrastructure
to prior state
• Testing diverts time & • Administrative time to
resources from strategic • Need to schedule downtime research and upgrade drains
activities for upgrades or migrate OpEx
• Patching and updating is a workloads
continuous process • Incremental Change
management requests can
delay updates

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 Unique Benefits of VxRail
VxRail HCI System Software ensures Continuously Validated States

• Rapid, automated full stack single click patching and updating

FostersOverburdened
Operational Disruption
• Eliminate time consuming research testing & change
Budget
Freedom staff
IT management to business efficiencies
• Automatically determine required upgrade components
• Limited resources to • Insufficient testing could • Disproportionate amount of
research upgrade options & result in outages or need to resources spent on
optimal components • go workload
Maintain back to continuity
prior state managing infrastructure
across technology generations
• Testing diverts time & to ensure
• Needstakeholder access
to schedule to applications
downtime • Administrative time to
Unlocks Innovation
resources from strategic • Non-disruptive upgrades seamlessly bypass releases
for upgrades research and upgrade drains
activities • Mixed node upgrades, refresh without migrations OpEx
• Incremental Change
• Patching and updating is a management requests can • Extensive test environments
continuous process delay updates divert CapEx funds
• Full stack testing and validation - HW & SW upgraded as one
integrated system
Evolves Predictably • Single point of support throughout the entire upgrade process
by default
• Automatically document all upgrade activity for compliance

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 Lifecycle management with VxRail
VxRail HCI System Software ensures Continuously Validated States

Overburdened Disruption Budget

IT staff to business efficiencies

Lower costs by 47%

compared to a similar
Improve IT infrastructure Reduce downtime public cloud solution2
team efficiency
with up to 88%
by up to 60% 1
fewer unplanned outages1 52%
Incur
lower cost of operations
compared with refreshing
legacy envionments1
1
“Delivering Efficient Business Expansion with Dell EMC VMware-Based HCI,” IDC whitepaper sponsored by Dell EMC, October 2018.
2
“The Cost of Using the Public Cloud,” Evaluator Group, Jan 2019.
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 Take advantage of our labs
How we ensure your Continuously Validated State

Test
2,500+ unique Our proven framework
test cases per
release

Service Optimize 100+

Full stack intel
Single point of
to get to next
Staff dedicated to testing
support, all the and quality assurance
validated state
time

4.7.210
4.7.200
4.7.410
4.7.400
4.7.300
4.7.212
4.7.211 $60M+
Lab investments

Sequence Analyze
Pre-
determines
Collect
insights,
> 25,000 hours
optimal order
of components
tailored Test run time for each
upgrades major release

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 Testing the validated state
Software Hardware

Example Upgrade Cadence

VxRail 4.7.100
ESXi 6.7 EP5
vSAN 6.7 U
BIOS 1.49 (422T0)
HBA
4.7.110 4.7.200 4.7.300
6.7 EP6 6.7 U2 6.7 U3
HBA Mini FW: 15.17.09.06 (MF6CM) Driver: 16.00.01.00 or 6.7 U3
HBA330 Adapter FW: 15.17.09.06 (7KY60) Driver: 16.00.01.00 6.7 U1 6.7 U2
NDC and
NICs
Intel i350 FW: N/A Driver: N/A
or
Intel x520 FW: N/A Driver: N/A
Intel x540 FW: N/A Driver: N/A
or
Intel x550 FW: 18.5.18 (3XJH0) Driver: 1.6.5
Intel x710 FW: 18.5.17 (T6VN9) Driver: 1.5.8
BCM57414 FW: 20.08.04.04 Driver: 20.8.152.0
iDRAC 3.21.23.22 (K877V)
• Choose your validated state
PTAgent 1.8.1-21
iSM
PM
3.3-1290 (833XD)
FW: 1.08 Driver: 1.11 (factory)
• Seamlessly bypass interim updates
M.2 disk See additional info
Boss/SATADOM 2.5.13.3011 (RPD7Y) / 2.5.13.1306 (MKV82)(Man • Document compliance automatically
…and MORE …

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 Automate lifecycle management
Traditional, vSAN Ready VxRail
manual approach Node with vLCM

• Define the version set to • Build desired state from set • Choose your Validated
update system of available components State and go!
• Perform your own • Determine the best option
interoperability testing and sequence to run in their
cluster
• Acquire update files
separately • Package the VMware
software bundle & acquire
• Upgrade components
firmware bits
separately within
approved change
windows
• Rely on multiple vendors
for support

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 Continuously
Validated States
Full stack lifecycle
management SaaS
Multi-cluster
Management
Management &
analytics
RESTful
VxRail HCI at scale
APIs
Cloud extensibility

System Software to support broad

VxRail use cases 
Manager
VxRail
Manager
Fully integrated Fully integrated
vCenter vCenter
Support
experience experience
Integrated, value added software Remote
for automation, orchestration Services
Simplified
and lifecycle management management
Ecosystem & support
Connectors
Tight integration
across the
Electronic entire stack
Compatibility
Matrix
Validates
compliance of
configurations
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