/ #converged #evo:rail 

Please meet VMware Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, EVO:RAIL

VMware will announce today at VMworld US its hyper-converged solution: EVO:RAIL™.

VMware EVO:RAIL is the first hyper-converged infrastructure appliance powered 100% by VMware’s compute, networking, storage, and management software. EVO: RAIL Deployment, Configuration, and Management streamlines initial setup and ongoing operations including updates with zero downtime and automatic scale-out. EVO:RAIL is fully deployed in minutes, once racked, cabled and powered on.

VMware EVO:RAIL logo

But, wait…so VMware will sell hardware now? No, VMware is not entering the hardware market. The EVO:RAIL software bundle is being made available to trusted partners who build, ship, and support the EVO:RAIL appliances. The version 1.0 of the EVO:RAIL software will support four EVO:RAIL appliances (four nodes per appliance) for a total of 16 ESXi hosts in the cluster.

What is interesting is that EVO:RAIL will be delivered as a complete solution, a building block with hardware, software and support under a single SKU (for a simplified licensing).

  • VMware will deliver the EVO:RAIL software bundle and specific instructions for building the appliance to qualified partners.

  • The EVO:RAIL partners source the hardware, build the appliance, sell to customers, and provide hardware and software support. Those partners include Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Inspur, NetOne and SuperMicro.

Each EVO:RAIL Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance (a.k.a. HCIA) consists of 4 nodes, where each node is an independent physical server. Each of these nodes have:

  • Two Intel E5-2620v2 six-core CPUs

  • 192GB of memory

  • One SLC SATADOM or SAS HDD for the ESXi™ boot device

  • Three SAS 10K RPM 1.2TB HDD for the VMware Virtual SAN™ datastore

  • One 400GB MLC enterprise-grade SSD for read/write cache

  • One Virtual SAN-certified pass-through disk controller

  • Two 10GbE NIC ports (configured for either 10GBase-T or SFP+ connections)

  • One 1GbE IPMI port for remote (out-of-band) management

For the storage, EVO:RAIL creates a single Virtual SAN datastore from all local HDDs on each ESXi host in a EVO:RAIL cluster, for a total storage capacity of 16TB per HCIA.

EVO:RAIL software bundle is comprised of:

  • EVO:RAIL Deployment, Configuration, and Management

  • VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus

  • Virtual SAN for storage

  • vCenter Server

  • vCenter Log Insight

EVO:RAIL enables deployment, configuration, and management through a new, intuitive HTML5-based user interface.

If you want to give you an idea about EVO:RAIL, you can watch some technical videos on VMware’s website.

Product page: EVO:RAIL.

Author

Romain

Staff II Technical Product Manager, technologist with 18+ years of Networking and Security experience in Data Center, Public Cloud & Virtualization (VMs and Containers). He is a double VCDX (DCV and NV, #120), VCDX panelist, frequent VMUG/VMworld speaker and contributor to the community via this blog or social media (follow him on Twitter @woueb).