Dell EMC VxFlex OS, formerly known as ScaleIO Software, is scale-out block storage software that enables customers to create a scale-out server SAN or hyper-converged infrastructure on x86 server hardware.
VxFlex OS uses local storage devices and turns them into shared block storage that has all the benefits of SAN-but at a fraction of cost and complexity. VxFlex OS will continue to support the existing customer installations and will support an upgrade path from ScaleIO software to the VxFlex OS release.
VxFlex Ready Node is a combination of VxFlex OS and Dell PowerEdge® servers, optimized to run VxFlex OS software, enabling customers to quickly deploy a fully architected, scale out server SAN with heterogeneous hypervisor support. It also includes Automated Management Services (AMS).
The lightweight VxFlex OS software components are installed on the application servers and communicate via a standard LAN to handle the application I/O requests sent to VxFlex OS block volumes. An extremely efficient decentralized block I/O flow, combined with a distributed, sliced volume layout, results in a massively parallel I/O system that can scale up to thousands of nodes.
VxFlex OS is designed and implemented with enterprise-grade resilience. Furthermore, the software features an efficient, distributed, self-healing process that overcomes media and node failures, without requiring administrator involvement.
Dynamic and elastic, VxFlex OS enables administrators to add or remove nodes and capacity onthe-fly. The software immediately responds to the changes, rebalancing the storage distribution and achieving a layout that optimally suits the new configuration.
Because VxFlex OS is hardware agnostic, the software works efficiently with various types of disks, including: magnetic (HDD) and solid-state disks (SSD), flash PCI Express (PCIe) cards, networks, and hosts. VxFlex OS can easily be installed in an existing infrastructure as well as in green field configurations.
New in 3.0.1
VMware vVols support
VxFlex OS now supports VMware Virtual Volumes (using VASA 2.0). vVols is another datastore type (in addition to VMFS and NFS) enabling VMs or virtual disks to be managed independently using storage policies (SPBM).
VM storage before vVols
VM storage with vVols
VASA Provider
Below, you can see a demo of the new support for vVols
Email Call-Home alerting Email alerting for VxFlex OS systems using a customer based smtp email server alternative to the standard (E)SRS service.
Fine Granularity (FG) layout support with VMware ESXi 6.7 (U2) HCI configurations Support for VxFlex Appliance and Integrated Rack customers only (managed by VxFlex Manager).
How it looks in vSphere
I/O latency metrics Volumes/SDCs can now be queried for I/O latency metrics.
New features in VxFlex OS v3.0.0.2 There are no new features in VxFlex OS v3.0.0.2. New feature in VxFlex OS v3.0.0.1 Support for upgrade of VxFlex OS on the VMware HCI platform, including SVM replacement support in Gateway/Installer and AMS. Refer to the relevant upgrade guides for detailed upgrade steps.
A new patched SVM is introduced in v3.0.0.1. There are two replacement options:
1. If you are using VxFlex OS v2.x with a SLES-based SVM, you can replace the SVM with a newly patched CentOS 7.5 based SVM. The replace feature is part of the release and is detailed in the documentation.
2. If you are using VxFlex OS v3.0 with the older, not fully patched CentOS 7.5 based SVM, there is an optional manual process to upgrade to the new SVM. The manual process is described in the Upgrade VxFlex OS Guide.
Download location VxFlex OS 3.0.1 software packages can be downloaded from the following locations: