Dell VxRail™ Appliance 4.7x Administration Guide

VxRail cluster expansion

Your VxRail cluster can be scaled from a minimum of three nodes. The VxRail Manager automated installation and scale-out features make it easy to expand your cluster as your business demands grow.

With the VxRail Manager multi-node expansion feature, you can perform cluster expansion with up to six nodes in parallel, reducing the time that is required to achieve greater compute and storage capacity.

Standard VxRail models hold from one to four nodes in a rackmount chassis. vSAN 2 Node appliance models hold from one to two nodes in a rackmount chassis. You may have a partially populated appliance chassis in the cluster. You can use the empty slots in the chassis for future expansion.

You can mix different VxRail models in the same cluster. Adhere to the following guidelines when deploying a mixed cluster:

• The first four nodes in a cluster must be of the same type and configuration. (If there are only three nodes in the cluster they must all be the same type and configuration.)
• All appliances in the cluster must be running VxRail Manager version 4.7.100 or higher.
• First-generation appliances (sold under the VSPEX BLUE name) are not supported.
• Appliances using 1 GbE networking cannot be used in clusters 10 GbE or 25 GbE networking, and appliances using 10 GbE networking cannot be used in clusters with 25 GbE networking.
• VxRail Intel-based nodes can only be added into a cluster with other Intel-based nodes. VxRail AMD-based nodes can only be added into a cluster with other AMD-based nodes.
• Hybrid nodes cannot be used in clusters with all-flash or all-NVMe nodes.
• All-NVMe nodes cannot be used in clusters with all-flash or hybrid nodes.

Work with your sales representative or reseller when planning your cluster expansion.