Determining your VxRail Deployment Type (Standard, Dynamic, vSAN-2-Node)

Read time: 3 minutes and 4 seconds

I often ask students what VxRail version they are running, how many clusters they have, how many nodes per cluster, and what type of deployments do they have. The answers to those questions are helpful for generating SolVe procedures and understanding the configuration options available for a given VxRail.

The focus here is on VxRail "Deployment Types" and their associated "Primary Storage". Primary storage in the context of VxRail is the shared storage for a VxRail cluster where VxRail Manager resides. All other storage attached to the cluster is considered secondary storage.

VxRail cluster Deployment Types and their associated primary storage:

1. Standard: Has 3 or more nodes and uses vSAN as primary storage.
2. vSAN 2-Node: Has 2 nodes and use vSAN as primary storage
3. Dynamic: Has 2 or more nodes and uses a supported Fibre Channel Array (7.0.240), vSAN HCI Mesh (7.0.200), NFS (7.0.350), iSCSI (7.0.350), or vVols (7.0.400) as primary storage.

The VxRail version detailing when a new primary storage option became available is listed in the Release Notes on the Dell Support site. 

*** Note, VCF on VxRail starts as a Standard cluster. Using VMware Cloud Builder, the cluster is converted into a VCF Management Workload Domain during the bring-up process. The bring-up process converts VxRail into VCF on VxRail. Additional VxRail clusters can later be added to the VCF on VxRail instance as part of a Tenant Workload Domains or even used to expand the Management Workload Domain. vSAN and Fibre Channel are supported as primary storage depending upon the version of VCF on VxRail. 

To determine if a VxRail is configured for VCF, log in to the vSphere client, and select a vCenter. In the Configure tab, select Advanced Settings. Filter the Name column for items that contain ""sddc". Notice the "config.SDDC.Deployed.Flavor" and "config.SDDC.Deployed.Type" attributes and their associated values:

Well, that's nice for VCF on VxRail, but the options below can be used for all VxRail deployments type (including VCF on VxRail). Unsurprisingly, we can determine the answer to these question in a variety of ways. 

In the vSphere client, select a VxRail Cluster. In the Summary tab, scroll down to the Custom Attributes section. Notice the "VxRail-Cluster-Tag" and "VxRail-Primary-Storage-Type" attributes and their associated values:

The listing of Custom Attributes can also be collected using the VMware PowerCLI. In the example below, the Get-Cluster cmdlet is used to get an inventory of cluster related items, that object is then piped to Get-Annotation to view annotations associated with the cluster inventory objects:

Alternatively, this can also be accomplished using the interactive VxRail onboard API documentation for the RESTful API using the "/4/system" endpoint path. The response body schema defines "deployment_type" and "shared_storage" name/value pairs which contains the values we're after. The VxRail onboard API documentation is accessible at: https:// /rest/api/doc.html : 

The VxRail API PowerShell Module use the RESTful API as well. The Get-SystemInfo cmdlet with the -Version v4 parameter leverages the same "/system/v4" endpoint path:

The REST API can be accessed directly to accomplish the same thing using PowerShell directly without having to install the VxRail API PowerShell Modules:

Finally, there is also a "systeminfo.yaml" sample playbook that is provided with the Ansible Modules for Dell EMC VxRail that also collects deployment_type details, again, using the REST API:

 

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