VMware EVO Rail

So what is EVO RAIL? EVO Rail is a rapid deployment, configuration, and management engine which enables hyper-converged infrastructure. It combines compute, network, and storage virtualization with vSphere and Virtual SAN. EVO Rail is going to transform and simplify IT operations. You will be able to power-on the hyper-converged device and create virtual machines in minutes, it provides easy VM deployment, and one-click non-disruptive patching and upgrades.

If you are not excited yet you should be! Hyper-converged architecture is going to be a non-disruptive, disruptive technology.

EVO Rail is a software package that is going to work on partner devices. These 2U/4 Node hardware platforms will be optimized for running EVO Rail. They will be 4 independent nodes for compute, networking, and storage; each node has dual processors with 192 GB of memory, and a total of 16 TB of flash and magnetic storage delivered by VMware Virtual SAN.

EVO Rail will scale-up to four hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA). New appliances are automatically discovered and added to the cluster with zero configuration. Each device will be accommodate roughly 100 general purpose servers or 250 VDI instances; with a maximum of 400 general purpose servers or 1000 VDI instances for a 4 appliance - 16 node configuration.

Here are some of the high level specifications:

Per node

• Dual Intel E5-26x0v2 6 core processors
• 192 GB of memory
• 3 x 1.2 TB HDD
• 1 x 400 GB Intell SSD
• 2 x 10 GbE NIC port
• 1 x 1GbE Management Port

Per Appliance

• 48 CPU cores - 100 GHz
• 768 GB memory capacity
• 14.4 TB storage capacity
• 1.6 TB flash capacity
• 80 GbE network bandwidth
• Dual redundant power supplies

EVO Rail is highly resilient by design, with four independent nodes and a distributed Virtual SAN datastore it helps ensure zero application downtown during planned maintenance, or during disk, network, or host failure.

The UI is intuitive; it provides the necessary tools for virtual machine creation and life-cycle management. Including giving you the option of choosing specific virtual machine sizes (small, medium, large), which network to connect the VM, and the VM security policy. After machine creation, it will provide a grid view of all the VMs across multiple appliances.

Additionally, it will provide a hardware summary status of each node, appliance, and cluster, with warning faults and notifications.

I think this is a very exciting announcement! EVO Rail is going to simplify infrastructure design with predictable sizing and scaling, while reducing operations cost with reduced complexity and efficiencies.