VxRail - Scale Out

One of the good things with VxRail is how easy it is to scale up or scale out. In this post I will show how easy it is to scale out adding an additional node to an existing cluster.

Prior to this the server was mounted in the rack, cabled to power and network, iDRAC was configured and because the customer is using vlan tagging on the Management Network the vlan was set with two commands on the node.

After the node is powered on, go to VxRail Manager, the new node is now discovered using multicast on the management network. Select the node(s) you want to add and click “Add nodes”

You are now prompted for credentials, fill out and hit “Next”

VxRail Manager now asks for IP addresses to the new node, because we at the installation time of the system set a pool bigger than what we needed it now automatically takes IPs from that pool otherwise just add IPs manually. Hit "Next"

Fill in the password you want for the root user and a username and password for an additional root user created by VxRail. These passwords must not be the same. The host must of curse have a DNS record created. Hit the “Validate” button.

Validation is now in progress. The validation process checks that the ip is not in use, time is correct, hardware is in healthy state, etc. this might take 5-10 minutes.

Validation is successful, hit “Expand Cluster” to start adding the node to the existing cluster.

Cluster Expansion is in progress, you can monitor the steps in VxRail Manager.

Cluster Expansion is complete. The complete task took about one hour.

Note: The node being added must be on the same version as the runing cluster, the easiest way to verify what VxRail version the new node is running is to check the vSphere build version and find the VxRail version in this KB: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52075 - if the node is not at the same version, a reset must be done before the expansion is done. I will not cover the reset procedure in details here, but you download a RAR-file, create a USB key from the RAR-file, place the USB key in the node, boot the node from the key and choose reset.