Dell EMC VxRail Appliance, Operation Manual

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1GbE option
A 1GbE switch option is available for smaller, less demanding workloads. Since lower-
bandwidth can affect performance and scale, the 1GbE option is only supported for hybrid-
storage configurations and is limited to a maximum of eight nodes and single-socket CPUs.
With 1GbE, a minimum of four NICs are required per node, increasing the number of switch
ports required.
VxRail VLANs
A virtual distributed switch (VDS) connects the physical switch ports to the logical components
in a VxRail Appliance. The VDS is configured as part of the system initialization. Port groups are
created spanning all nodes in the cluster. Network traffic is isolated at the port-group level using
switch-based VLAN technology and vSphere Network IO Control (NetIOC). Network traffic is
segregated using switch-based VLAN technology with a recommendation of a minimum of four
VLANs for the four types of network traffic in a VxRail cluster:
 Management. Management traffic is use for connecting to VMware vCenter web client,
VxRail Manager, and other management interfaces and for communications between the
management components and the ESXi nodes in the cluster. Either the default VLAN or a
specific management VLAN is used for management traffic.
 vSAN. Data access for read and write activity as well as for optimization and data rebuild is
performed over the vSAN network. Low network latency is critical for this traffic and a
specific VLAN is required to isolate this traffic.
 vMotion. VMware vMotion allows virtual-machine mobility between nodes. A separate
VLAN is used to isolate this traffic.
 Virtual Machine. Users access virtual machines and the services provided over the VM
networks. At least one VM VLAN is configured when the system is initially configured, and
others may be defined as required.
The tables below show how the NIOCs are configured for VxRail. Do not modify these values
since they have been set for optimum availability and performance.
Table 3. VxRail traffic on 10GbE NICs