VMware is pleased to announce the next entrant in the recently created Global Partner Appliance category, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. VMware vSAN has the industry’s largest HCI ecosystem, and recently introduced a new category, the Global Partner Appliance, to recognize partners that have added value on top of their ReadyNodes, or jointly-certified servers. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX series is built on Lenovo ThinkSystem platforms and comes with software pre-installed and hardware pre-configured with professional services to get it up and running quickly. The ThinkAgile VX series also integrated with vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) for unified hardware and software updates, and it includes single source support for both hardware and software.
What is a Global Partner Appliance?
Global Partner Appliances (GPAs) offer customers two core benefits beyond ReadyNodes: simplified lifecycle management and unified support. Each hardware OEM in the category has created their unique lifecycle management tools that either integrate with VMware HCI or augment VMware HCI tools to offer simplified installation, deployment and maintenance of the HCI solution. Global Partner Appliances:
- Come Pre-installed with VMware HCI: VMware vSphere, vSAN and vCenter Server
- Include hardware vendor-built tools for lifecycle management, which can include day zero to day two operations, reducing time for routine activities. Many appliances offer fully validated updates to ensure compatibility for the hardware and software stack.
- Include single source support for both hardware and software, with a minimum of Levels 1 and 2 support.
- May include additional capabilities. Some vendors may choose to include features beyond lifecycle management and unified support, such as deployment services and proactive support.
What is Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series?
As a fully integrated, pre-configured and tested VMware HCI Global Partner Appliance, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series delivers a turnkey experience providing IT organizations with an easy way to deploy hyperconverged infrastructure based on VMware vSAN.
Lenovo ThinkAgile VX series provides a wide range of platforms and flexibility to support any HCI use case, including general-purpose virtualization, compute-heavy applications such as VDI, GPU-intense servers for graphics-intensive VDI, storage-dense nodes for long-term, high capacity storage and high-performance for mission-critical workloads, such as relational databases and SAP HANA.
For lifecycle management, Lenovo ships every appliance with software pre-installed and firmware pre-configured, so its ready to go out of the box. In addition, Lenovo provides ease of mind for updates by certifying each firmware/driver and software update prior to release to users. In addition, Lenovo pushes updates in unison, so customers can update both hardware and software simultaneously. There’s no need to deploy firmware in test clusters. When implementing updates, Lenovo has made it as easy as possible by integrating the XClarity Integrator with VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager, or vLCM. vLCM is the new lifecycle management tool to update VMware HCI hardware and software and introduces a new declarative model that implements a desired image at the cluster level, continuously monitors the cluster for compliance and provides one-click remediation in event of drift.
Finally, all Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series appliances come with ThinkAgile Advantage support, which provides single source of L1/L2 support for both hardware and software, which may lead to faster recovery. In addition, Lenovo offers a deployment service to get your infrastructure up and running quickly.
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