EVO:RAIL - Use Cases?

Question

I think as soon as the world becomes aware of EVO:RAIL then folks will start asking what the use cases are. It's clear that there are couple of immediate use cases, but I'm betting that customers will bring to the table applications that perhaps we hadn't considered. The other night I was our Tech Summit event (its private event for VMware SE/TAMs to attend prior to VMworld to get them up to speed on what the announcements are all about), and I was approached by a number of SE/TAMs who are interested in running EVO:RAIL in the basements and garages as the foundation to their homelabs. Even with the onsite of Cloud - and we have an internal cloud that SE/TAMs can use demo products to customers - just like the VMware Community they still have a passion for building out their own demos, just how they like them - that they can tailor make to handle customer questions that come up. I'm the same, despite being at VMware for 2+ years, I'm still running my own gear at home. It just worked out more cost effective form my needs than keeping my 42U rack at a colo.
I doubt that my might the "WAF" would apply to having a 4U box with 4 nodes inside it - in the spare bedroom. So I'm already looking at running EVO:RAIL in a nested configuration on my home lab gear for testing, videos and demos to customers. That work has already been done for the VMworld HoL, by William Lam (the undisputed king of nested ESX, well, perhaps Simon Gallagher comes close!) - who's done some excellent work on this already. So hopefully it won't take much work to get hold of the bits from the HoL, and pump the lastest build of EVO:RAIL into it...
Anyway, I digress use cases. It's clear that ROBO, SMB and VDI are the top use cases - situations where an appliance like model, with zero configuration (almost!) is needed. I think we perhaps be a bit careful with the SMB use case. EVO:RAIL is 4xNodes in a 4U configuration with each node presenting 192GB of RAM. One thing I've always been concerned with is how variable "SMB" is as term. Over here in a the US an SMB would be classed as company with <1000 employees. Over here in Europe, that would be regarded as still quite large for an SMB.. The same goes ROBO. So I guess what I'm saying is size is relative, and so we have to be careful when use terms like "small".
Folks who know me will know that I'm a big fan of VMware Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication - having written books about the version 1.0, 40 and 5.0 versions. I think there's use case where an EVO:RAIL is put into some colocation facilitiy and used as DR target. The important thing to remember about EVO:RAIL as its based on vSphere 5.5 U2, other products in the vCloud Suite family will work with it - like SRM, View, vCloud Director or vCAC... So its not some special "moded" version of the platform. Perhaps a better model for DR and EVO:RAIL is to run VR locally on it, and use vCloud Air as the target for recovery...? I guess we have to ask the question what's going to be more popular/easier. Two site with EVO:RAIL at either end, or EVO:RAIL enabled for DR to the cloud. Just to be clear. That isn't baked into EVO:RAIL today, I'm just blue sky thinking about the possibilities in the future.
So what do folks think here? Can you dream up any other scenarios where an EVO:RAIL would be good fit...?

Answer 1

You make some valid points there, but there's a couple of things that are worth clarifying....
Firstly, EVO:RAIL is pre-installed at factory. So really the only "installation" is racking up, and connecting to the TOR. In fact I think an EVO:RAIL is easier to setup that a VSA is, and gives more usable disk space, and lower cost per gigabyte..
IF the customer has given the OEM the IPs, IP Ranges, Hostnames, and Passwords - then it literally is a 15min setup after clicking "Build Appliance". On the other hand if the customer wants to customize the EVO:RAIL prior to build - such as changing the VLANs Tags (That they supplied) that would add a couple of minutes...
vDS is NOT a prequistie. EVO:RAIL uses standard switches... Although an EVO:RAIL is licensed for Enterprize Plus. There's no requirement to configure a Distributed Switches.
The real "asks" here is the customer needs 10Gb switch - I think its fair to say that isn't common in SMB/ROBO environment. I suspect many of the OEMs will be asking the customer to validate their switch configuation. Multicast for IPv4/IPv6 is used by the "Zero Network Configuation" on the management/VSAN networks. As the name suggest no configuration is required on the EVO:RAIL, its used as part of the discovery process for finding the nodes, and finding new appliances. One most switches this tick off box option on the switch for the VLANs that require it...
Anyone of my plans is to order an EVO:RAIL from one of our suppliers just like a customer would, and document/record that process. So i can get a feel for a real world customer experience would be. In fact I might see if my wife, Carmel can set it up... :-)