Dell VPLEX is a front-end appliance that connects to the backend fabric switches. The primary purpose is to abstract physical storage into virtual storage. You have high-end or mid-range physical storage from HP, Dell EMC, IBM, etc., and VPLEX virtual appliances are an intermediary between the storage and the whole.
VPLEX consolidates multiple kinds of storage into one and creates availability for a higher level of storage. There are two redundant paths between the server and the storage appliances, and we need two MDS switches for them. One is the Dell Fabric switch, which fulfills our requirements for redundancy, and the second is a load balancer. The best practice in any small environment is to use two MDS switches to connect the host and storage, whether you use VPLEX virtualization or not.
The best feature of VPLEX storage is its ability to consolidate storage. It also provides the highest RPO and RTOs for replication technology. VPLEX enables application mobility.
For example, say you are building an application, and you need two cluster servers. The cluster contains two nodes at the same site, so if that location goes down, then your application will go offline.
To overcome this issue, we establish another node at a separate site that may be within the same city or another part of the world. That is called metro-clustering and geo-clustering. Both nodes have access to the same storage, creating high availability and redundancy.
In the event of a disaster, your application will be moved to any other node or passed to any available site, and your application can access storage. This is VPLEX's critical feature.
