Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware EVO:RAIL FAQ

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Over the last couple of days the same VMware EVO:RAIL questions keep popping up over and over again. I figured I would do a quick VMware EVO:RAIL Q&A post so that I can point people to that instead of constantly answering them on twitter.

  • Can you explain what EVO:RAIL is?
    • EVO:RAIL is the next evolution of infrastructure building blocks for the SDDC. It delivers compute, storage and networking in a 2U / 4 node package with an intuitive interface that allows for full configuration within 15 minutes. The appliance bundles hardware+software+support/maintenance to simplify both procurement and support in a true “appliance” fashion. EVO:RAIL provides the density of blade with the flexibility of rack. Each appliance comes with 100GHz of compute power, 768GB of memory capacity and 14.4TB of raw storage capacity (plus 1.6TB of flash for IO acceleration purposes). For full details, read my intro post.
  • Where can I find the datasheet?
  • What is the minimum number of EVO:RAIL hosts?
    • Minimum number is 4 hosts. Each appliance comes with 4 independent hosts, which means that 1 appliance is the start. It scales per appliance!
  • What is included with an EVO:RAIL appliance?
    • 4 independent hosts each with the following resources
      • 2 x E5-2620 6 core
      • 192GB Memory
      • 3 x 1.2TB 10K RPM Drive for VSAN
      • 1 x 400Gb eMLC SSD for VSAN
      • 1 x ESXi boot device
      • 2 x 10GbE NIC port (SFP / RJ45 can be selected)
      • 1 x IPMI port
    • vSphere Enterprise Plus
    • vCenter Server
    • Virtual SAN
    • Log Insight
    • Support and Maintenance for 3 years
  • What is the total available storage capacity?
    • After the VSAN Datastore is formed and vCenter Server is installed / configured there is about 13.1TB left
  • How many VMs can I run on one appliance?
    • That will very much depend on the size of the virtual machine and the workload. We have been able to comfortably run 250 desktops on one appliance. With Server VMs we ended up with around 100. However, again this very much depends on things like workload / capacity etc.
  • How many EVO:RAIL appliance can I scale to?
    • With the current release EVO:RAIL scales to 4 appliance (aka 16 hosts)
  • If licensing / maintenance / support is three 3 years, what happens after?
    • After 3 years support/maintenance expires. It can be extended, or the appliance can be replaced when desired.
  • How is support handled?
    • All support is handled through the OEM the EVO:RAIL HCIA has been procured through. This ensures that “end to end” support will be provided through the same channel.
  • Who are the EVO:RAIL qualified partners?
    • The following partners were announced at VMworld: Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Inspur, Net One Systems, Supermicro, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, NetApp
  • How much does an EVO:RAIL appliance cost?
    • Pricing will be set by qualified partners
  • I was told Support and Maintenance is for 3 years, what happens after 3 years?
    • You can renew your support and maintenance with 2 years at most (as far as I know).
    • If not renewed then the EVO:RAIL appliance will remain functioning, but entitlement to support is gone.
  • What if I buy a new appliance after 3 years, can I re-use my licenses that come with the EVO:RAIL appliance??
    • No, the licenses are directly tied to the appliance and cannot be transferred to any other appliance or hardware.
  • Will NSX work with EVO:RAIL?
    • EVO:RAIL uses vSphere 5.5 and Virtual SAN. Anything that works with that will work with EVO:RAIL. NSX has not been explicitly tested but I expect that this should be no problem.
  • Does it use VMware Update Manager (VUM) for updating/patching?
    • No EVO:RAIL does not use VUM for updating and patching. It uses a new mechanism which is built from scratch and comes as part of the EVO:RAIL engine. This to provide a simple updating and patching mechanism, while avoiding the need for a Windows VM (VUM requires Windows).
  • What kind of NIC card is included?
    • 10GbE dual port NIC per host. Majority of vendors will offer both SFP+ and RJ45. This means there is 8 x 10GbE switch port per EVO:RAIL appliance required!
  • Is there a physical switch included?
    • A physical switch is not part of the “recipe” VMware provided to qualified partners, but some may package one (or multiple) with it to simplify green field deployments.
  • What is MARVIN or Mystic ?
    • MARVIN (Modular Automated Rackable Virtual Infrastructure Node) was the codename used by VMware internally for EVO:RAIL. Mystic was the codename used by EMC. Both of them refer to EVO:RAIL
  • Where does EVO:RAIL run?
    • EVO:RAIL runs on vCenter Server. vCenter Server is powered-on automatically when the appliance is started and the EVO:RAIL engine can then be used to configure the appliance
  • Which version of vCenter Server do you use, the Windows version or the Appliance?
    • In order to simplify deployment EVO:RAIL uses the vCenter Server Appliance.
  • Can I use the vCenter Web Client to manage my VMs or do I need to use the EVO:RAIL engine?
    • You can use whatever you like to manage your VMs. Web Client is fully supported and configured for you!
  • Are there networking requirements?
    • IPv6 is required for configuration of the appliance and auto-discovery. Multicast traffic on L2 is required for Virtual SAN
  • …

Some great EVO:RAIL links:

If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in comments section and I will do my best to answer them.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  3. “No EVO:RAIL does not use VUM for updating and patching. It uses a new mechanism which is built from scratch and comes as part of the EVO:RAIL engine”….. Is this a glimpse of the death of VUM on a C# vSphere Client/Windows box… I would assume that I am not alone and a lot are waiting for this day when VUM is nolonger tied to Windows and I can have multiple vSphere suite attach to just one VUM…

  4. so – Could this be considered a HARDWARE appliance? I’m guessing even it was, we still couldn’t load Oracle on it (?) Also, is this just a one-stop shop for support? as we could do the same thing with HP or IBM servers and customize it to our corp. requirements…

  6. 2 x E5-2620 6 cores per host ist not that much compute power. Is this the entry level configuration and others will follow?

      • Yeah, maybe we are an exception. But we have a lot of VMs with 8-10 vCPUs. So we use pCPUs with 10+ Cores.

      • 4x E5-2695/7 v2 per appliance would provide more compute for half the sockets (and licenses). Then, 192 GB RAM per two sockets seems awfully small. Why not 256/384/512 GB with more powerful CPU’s not unlike Nutanix’s 3050/3060?

  7. So where does the EVO:RAIL engine actually run?
    4 x nodes get configured via EVO:RAIL interface, as well as vCenter.

  9. Will the VUM replacement be available separately as well, maybe for ESXi 6? It’s one thing holding back using vCSA, together with no supported backup/restore methods.

  11. Hey Duncan,

    Can you confirm EVO:RAIL uses the vCSA for its vCenter?

    Also sounds like the EVO management layer & automation is a service running on the vCSA?

    Just trying to get the whole picture.

    Thanks,

  13. VC servers are already a resource hog in our environment, how much more resources will we need to add to the VC server to support EVO?

  14. P.S. Is there a limit on how many appliances you can have per cluster? I.E…can you have 8 appliances configured for a 32 node cluster? Or is the max # of appliances below 8?

  15. Interesting to see LogInsight bundled with it, but not vSOM (vSphere with Ops Manager).

    Why is LogInsight bundled, and why isn’t vSOM?

    • LogInsight helps both customers and partners when it comes to troubleshooting etc. vSOM if there is a customer demand for it may be added in the future.

  16. 2 10GbE ports per 4 hosts seems very, very low. I’ll grant that if you’re only using one brick, you don’t need a vmotion network, but I’d much rather see these with 40GbE. Is there upgrade potential in the boxes? If so, that makes it a very appealing solution in some ways.

  17. Considering that I currently have 8 10GbE ports per node in my cluster and am planning a minimum of 2×40 in my next… still a bit low. But better than I thought.

  18. It’s possible access and manage hosts and virtual machines from vSphere Web Client, connecting directly to vCSA or ESXi hosts? or only from EVO:RAIL webpage.

  19. Hmm, so your saying that the vCenter is hosted within the same cluster which it is managing?

    Is it possible have the vCenter run on a management cluster which is not part of EVO?

    I like the whole concept of EVO, just not sure I want to run my vCenter within the cluster and on VSAN..

  20. 13.1TB before taking FTT into consideration right? So with FTT=1 we’re about 6.5TB useable?

  21. It’s possible do centralized management of a tradicional vsphere platform and a EVO:RAIL cluster together? Or I must discard tradicional vCenter and add ESXi hosts to EVO:RAIL vCSA?

    If VCSA don’t support Linked Mode, I suppose that i can’t link EVO:RAIL to producction vSphere. In this case, all remote and branch office (ROBO) will be isolated clusters.

  22. What happens if a customer does not have IPV6 on their network? “Are there networking requirements?
    IPv6 is required for configuration of the appliance and auto-discovery. Multicast traffic on L2 is required for Virtual SAN”

      • Just a quick and dirty estimate: a single node (1/4 of appliance) should be about $30-40K in Dell prices. Throw in VMware and VSAN licenses and you get about $50-60K per 1/4 appliance, so about $200-240K per appliance. A full 16-node cluster would then indeed be about $0.8-1M – which is likely what was meant.
        Still, a customized VSAN config could give something similar for 1/2 the price, just saying…

        • If that would be the case, then the big difference here is that the appliance will include 3 years of Support and Maintenance upfront. I think if you take all of the various parts in to account the comparison will look different 🙂

  25. Would it be accurate to say that the EVO RAIL engine can only manage a single vSphere cluster (4-16 nodes)? In other words, can you manage multiple 16 node EVO RAIL clusters from a single management interface?

    Also, are stretched (metro) clusters supported? My assumption is no. Thanks for the great post.

  27. How many VMs can I run on one appliance?

    Would mind going thru the math on how 100 VMs were achieved using the appliance specs as stated by VMware here http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/evorail/vmware-evorail-faq.pdf .

    Based on this PDF each appliance would consist of the following:

    4-nodes * 2-sockets = 8 physical processors
    8 processors * 6-core each = 48 physical cores
    Enable hyperthreading = 96 virtual cores

    4-nodes * 192GB memory ea. = 768GB memory total

    Each VMware publicized virtual machine requires:
    “General-purpose VM profile: 2 vCPU, 4GB vMEM, 60GB of vDisk, with redundancy”

    If you have 96 virtual cores and each general purpose VM needs 2 vCPU how do you achieve 100 VMs?

    Thank you for the help on clearing this up.

  28. My question .. I have just received some training on this at work for the Mystic platform, and so afterwords I went over to the VMware HOL lab to play with their EVO:RAIL vApp lab for a bit. So I built the appliance, and it appears to have built it on vCSA, although I am unable to determine where it is nested since I do not see it in vCenter as an appliance on itself. My question is, where does vCenter appliance get nested on the real appliance? Is it a hidden virtual machine not visible in inventory? Or is the lab I used have it nested somewhere else (like up one level)? If it is invisible to vCenter, then how to you administer that VM when there are problems?

    • You were running it nested and it runs outside of that environment indeed at that point for performance reasons (otherwise it would be running on top of nested ESXi) Normally it would run on the ESXi hosts that are part of the EVO box.

  29. Hi,

    i got a question about this :

    Q. How is network traffic prioritized?
    A. To ensure vSphere vMotion traffic does not consume all available bandwidth on the 10GbE port, EVO:RAIL limits vMotion traffic to 4Gbps.

    How is it made ? How do they limit the traffic to 4Gbps for vMotion ?

    Thanks