Above diagram is a VxRail Cluster with 4 nodes. In this post I will show how to add one new VxRail Appliance into this VxRail Cluster (From 4 nodes to 5).
Remark: The model of each VxRail Appliance is P570.
Before the node expansion, we need to verify each Appliance is running in health in dashboard of VxRail Manager.
Above is the final physical diagram of VxRail Cluster after scale out. Now we start the node expansion. We have just mounted a new VxRail Appliance (other model – E560) and cabled it up to the top of each rack switch. When we power it on you can see a notification appear in the top left corner of VxRail dashboard. Click “Add Nodes“.
Remark: It is supported to mix and match VxRail appliance series in the cluster.
Input the vCenter Server User Credentials, “Next“.
When we initially configured your VxRail Appliance, we specified an IP pool for ESXi, vMotion and vSAN. We can see that there available IP addresses in these pools, then input the ESXi and management account password. Click “Validate“.
VxRail Manager has validated the ESXi, vSAN and vMotion IP addresses, and we are now ready to expand ourVxRail Appliance. Click “Expand cluster“.
We can monitor the expansion is in progress in the dashboard.
Now our new VxRail Appliance has been expanded. Click the “Health” tab to examine the cluster and verify the new node we just added.
We can see the new node (E560) added into the VxRail cluster.
Then we login into VxRail vCenter with vCenter webclient, we can see the five nodes are running in a ESXi cluster.
The vSAN disk groups are running in a health status. This cluster expansion is successfully completed.
Categories: Dell EMC VMware vSAN
Victor Wu
Chief Architect, Blogger, Author at Dell EMC Knowledge Sharing & Packt
Victor Virtualization 
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