The Dell XC Series platform is a scale-out cluster of high-performance nodes each running a standard hypervisor and containing processors, memory and local storage (consisting of SSD Flash and high capacity SATA disk drives). The Dell XC Series platform is powered by Nutanix software and managed through the Nutanix Prism interface. The Dell XC Series Platform can horizontally scale from as few as three nodes to a large number of nodes, enabling organizations to scale their infrastructure as their needs grow.
Each node runs virtual machines just like a standard virtual machine host and currently VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors are supported. In addition, local storage from all nodes is virtualized into a unified pool by the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS). In effect, NDFS acts like an advanced NAS that uses local SSDs and disks from all nodes to store virtual machine data. Virtual machines running on the cluster write data to NDFS as if they were writing to shared storage.
What’s New
New white paper on Microsoft Hyper-V reference architecture by Principled Technologies.
See how to set up the XC Series hyperconverged solution as a Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 cluster with Microsoft Hyper-V. This reference architecture explains our findings and offers a guide and best practices for implementing this solution in your datacenter.
Announcing the Dell XC730xd-12C “Cold Tier Storage” node, availability of KVM hypervisor, new drives, memory, and CPUs.
The Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged appliances integrates the world-class proven PowerEdge 13th generation server platform from Dell and Nutanix web-scale software to deliver a simple, cost effective hyper-converged solution for virtualized enterprise workloads. This highly differentiated infrastructure solution natively consolidates compute and storage in a single appliance and enables data center expansion one node at a time, with zero down time, delivering linear and predictable scale-out with pay-as-you-grow flexibility.
Update to Dell XC Series 2.0 HBA Firmware
The supported H730 host bus adapter version has changed. You now must use firmware version 25.2.2-0004.
Coming Soon!
Want to know about VDI best practices using the Dell XC Series 2.0 solutions? Our next white paper focuses on a 13th generation based Dell XC Series solution.
Useful Links
Dell XC Series Technical Content
This page is a frequently updated collection of all Dell XC Series technical content produced by Marketing, Dell Storage Engineering, and Solution Partners. Add this page to your watch list for notification of new publications.
Dell XC Series Product Documentation
Want all the installation and deployment details about this solution? Hop over to our product documentation page here.
Nutanix Documents
Link to Nutanix document resources including: VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, and Citrix XenApp best practices.