In my deep dive post on the VxRail VD-4000, we looked at the use cases and hardware details for this new offering.
In this post, I want to showcase the deployment process of a 2-Node Cluster with embedded witness (VD-4000W).

The VD-4000 witness sled runs ESXi on it's Atom C3508 CPU and 16GB of memory. The full deployment process is integrated into the VxRail Day 1 Deployment workflow.

The witness hardware is discovered in the same way as the compute sleds, via VxRail Manager. You can review the witness details on the bottom of the screen.

As part of the VxRail Deployment Wizard, the updated "Witness Network Settings" page caters for the hardware sled and witness VM requirements.
It includes the compute ESXi witness settings, witness hardware settings as well as the witness VM.


During the deployment process, you can see that the automated deployment workflows take care of the end to end witness sled configuration and associated VM tasks.




Once the VxRail deployment is completed, we can see the 2-Node Cluster components in the vCenter inventory.
For the VxRail managed witness, VxRail Manager takes care of the full lifecycle aspects.



Lastly, the VD-4000 2-Node Cluster with embedded witness, is also available now as self-deploy option for experienced VxRail customer.