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 primary use case for Dell VPLEX is for normal VMware services when there are two different data centers involved and the user wants to stay online all the time.

We use VPLEX on all of our net production machines — integration, migration, development. VPLEX is our main storage solution for our architecture. We have a lot of machines on it. We also use VPLEX on our virtual cluster. 

Our company has roughly 15,000 employees. Currently, we have eight VPLEX clusters. We have moved all of our architecture onto VPLEX.

We use Dell VPLEX for backend connectivity within the storage. We also use it when we want to manage redundancy for any storage.

This is a kind of front-end product for back-end storage systems. It's useful for migration solutions. We were partnersThe company has a partnership with Dell. I'm a senior consultant and previously worked at this enterprise business solution center.

We only use VPLEX for VMware Cloud or IBM Cloud and some physical servers with Windows, Linux and maybe we have some IEX servers connected to the VPLEX.

This is our centralized storage for our applications and data.

Corporate storage for VMware, databases, and file servers supporting a multi-vendor structure with several storage models.