VMware EVO:Rail, a hot announced by VMware. EVO:RAIL is a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCIA) offering by VMware and qualified EVO:RAIL partners include include Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Inspur, NetOne and SuperMicro. EVO represents a new family of ‘Evolutionary’ Hyper-Converged Infrastructure offerings from VMware. RAIL represents the first product within the EVO family that will ship during the second half of 2014. More on the meaning of RAIL towards the end of my post.
EVO:RAIL-hyper-converged infrastructure appliance which consists of EVO:RAIL Software bundle and 2U 4-Node hardware platform. VMware is going to provide the software appliance and Hardware Partners will provide EVO:RAIL compatible hardware. This Hyper-Converged Infrastructure offering typically combine compute, network and storage resources into a single unit of deployment.VMware EVO:RAIL is the software appliance which allows easy install (15min install time) of everything (ESXi and vCenter) and easy administration.
EVO:RAIL is a scalable Software-Defined Infrastructure building block that delivers compute, networking, storage, and management to empower end-user computing, remote office and branch office environments, and small virtual private clouds. The EVO:RAIL engine that is responsible for deployment, configuration and management activities builds on the proven technology of VMware vSphere, vCenter Server .
EVO: RAIL delivers the first hyper-converged infrastructure appliance 100% powered by VMware. The EVO: RAIL software bundle is pre-installed on the partner’s hardware.
- EVO: RAIL Deployment, Configuration, and Management
- VMware vSphere® Enterprise Plus, including ESXi for compute
- Virtual SAN for storage
- vCenter Server™
- vCenter Log Insight™
Hardware Platform for EVO:RAIL:
Each EVO:RAIL HCIA has four independent server nodes with dedicated computer, network, and storage resources, backed by dual redundant power supplies.
Each of the four EVO:RAIL nodes have (at a minimum):
- Two Intel E5-2620 v2 six-core CPUs
- 192GB of memory
- One SLC SATADOM or SAS HDD as 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
All of this leads to an EVO:RAIL HCIA with a combined total of at least 100GHz CPU resources, 768GB of memory resources, 14.4TB of storage capacity and 1.6TB of flash capacity (storage acceleration services).
VMware EVO:RAIL Scale Out Possibility
EVO: RAIL Version 1.0 can scale out to four appliances—for a total of 16 ESXi hosts, 1 Virtual SAN datastore backed by a single vCenter Server and EVO: RAIL instance. EVO: RAIL handles deployment, configuration, and management, allowing the compute capacity and the Virtual SAN datastore to grow automatically. New appliances are automatically discovered and easily added to an EVO: RAIL cluster with a few mouse clicks.
