EVO:RAIL

What Does EVO:RAIL Mean?

EVO:RAIL is a scalable software-defined data center (SDDC) building block (server hardware) which is used to deliver compute, storage and networking resources along with management products. VMware calls it a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance (HCIA) as it combines the aforementioned resources into a single unit of deployment. In this case, EVO:RAIL is a 2U unit which has four independent physical nodes.

Techopedia Explains EVO:RAIL

EVO:RAIL is VMware’s complete delivery solution package for an enterprise which requires quick setup for a virtualized environment. It is able to boot up the first virtual machine in just minutes once the appliance has been racked, cabled and powered on. The management user interface of EVO:RAIL greatly simplifies VM creation and deployment; it is simple to manage and has single-click non-disruptive upgrades and patches, and is very scalable.

The name EVO:RAIL comes from two things: EVO from “evolutionary,” which is the adjective VMware uses for their new Hyper-Converged Infrastructure offerings. RAIL simply represents the rail mounts that are attached to a 2U/4-node server platform hardware that is inserted into a data center rack.

Each of the four nodes on the EVO:RAIL have a minimum specification of:

• Two Intel 6 core CPUs (E5-2620 V2)
• 192 GB of RAM
• One ESXi boot device either SAS HDD or SLC SATADOM
• VMware Virtual SAN datastore composed of three SAS 1.2TB 10K RPM HDDs
• One enterprise-grade 400 GB MLC SSD used as read/write cache
• One Virtual SAN-certified disk controller (pass through)
• Two 10 GbE NIC ports
• One 1 GbE IPMI port used for out-of-band or remote management