As VxRail nears its seventh birthday, I want to share this video highlighting the growth and history of innovation that has made it the HCI platform it is today and highlight the next stops on our journey. We recently made a number of announcements at VMware Explore in San Francisco and Barcelona, and we were excited to hear how enthusiastic customers are about the new platform and feature enhancements.
The core theme woven through these announcements was the ongoing innovation and partnership between Dell and VMware. You may not be aware that our VxRail collaboration is only one of more than 40 Dell Technologies and VMware joint innovation programs, and it’s definitely one of the most enduring.
You likely do know Dell VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system with VMware. The deep integration of our VxRail HCI System Software with the VMware ecosystem delivers significant operational benefits and rapid ROI. It was an honor to moderate a customer panel with great testimonials, and we are proud VxRail is the winner of the CRN Tech Innovator Award in the hyperconverged infrastructure category two years in a row.
We are excited to announce the innovations we announced with VMware are now available. Last month, VMware released vSphere 8, and in accordance with our 30-day synchronous release commitment, VMware vSphere 8 and VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture are now available for VxRail 8.0.000, along with support for vSphere Distributed Services Engine on Data Processing Units (DPUs), more commonly known as VMware Project Monterey.
Driving Innovation with Our Partners
One of the more exciting recent announcements from VMware was the first iteration of Project Monterey, focused on enhancing CPU performance by offloading VMware services to Data Processing Units (DPUs). Today we are announcing availability of the industry’s first and only jointly engineered HCI system running VMware vSphere Distributed Service Engine on NVIDIA and AMD Pensando DPUs.¹ By offloading and optimizing network and security services to the DPU, the CPU can dedicate its time to application processing. This ultimately enhances the visibility of network traffic and improves infrastructure with Zero Trust Security.
The VxRail advantage is the automation, orchestration and full-stack lifecycle management brought about by the VxRail HCI System Software, or our “secret sauce” as I like to call it. It’s the VxRail HCI System Software that makes the integration of VMware vSphere 8 and DPUs even better by extending the full-stack lifecycle management to the DPUs. The VxRail HCI System Software simplifies operations across your entire VxRail landscape with a single, consistent operational model. We spend thousands of hours – 800,000 to be more precise – testing and validating each component of the ecosystem to ensure your upgrade to VMware vSphere 8, or adding NVIDIA or Pensando DPUs to your landscape, goes seamlessly.
Take on Higher Performance Workloads
We’re also releasing the new VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture on VxRail E660N and P670N, all NVMe platforms. Again, VxRail is the first and only jointly engineered HCI system optimized for vSAN Express Storage Architecture, which provides a 4x increase in vSAN performance.¹ This enables users to take full advantage of advances in hardware to run more high-performance workloads and reduce write latency while minimizing the impact on CPUs.
A number of VxRail customers still run high-performance workloads on three tier architecture due to performance and storage services requirements. They are excited to now be able to migrate those workloads to VxRail clusters running vSAN ESA so they can have a consistent, automated operational experience across the entire infrastructure.
Quickly Adopt New Technology with Dell VxRail
If you look back at the last six years of VxRail, we thrive on feedback from our customers. Plus, we ensure that as new technology comes to market, you can quickly adopt and reap the benefits with the certainty Dell Technologies has fully tested and validated VxRail so you don’t have to. As we build upon our two decades of collaboration, Dell Technologies and VMware will continue to deliver a highly differentiated and innovative HCI system with Dell VxRail.
Learn more at Dell’s VxRail solutions page.
1 Based on Dell analysis, August 2022.
