Today at VMworld in San Francisco VMware announced a new product to help with the Software Defined Datacenter called EVO:RAIL.

The goal of EVO:RAIL is to simplify how you buy, deploy, and operate your SDDC. EVO:RAIL is a scale out elastic hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. Sold by a qualified hardware partner and enabled by VMware, EVO:RAIL is built using vSphere, vCenter Server, and vSAN.

Hardware wise the appliance is a 2U 4 node platform. Each node has dual processors and 192GB of memory. For vSAN it uses three 10k 1.2TB SAS drives and a single 400GB MLC SSD for IO acceleration.

The first version of EVO: RAIL can scale out to four appliances for a total of 16 ESXi hosts with a single Virtual SAN datastore backed by a single vCenter Server. New appliances are automatically discovered and easily added to an EVO: RAIL cluster.

EVO: RAIL Deployment, Configuration, and Management is the slick new HTML5 interface that allows for the radically fast VM deployment, one click upgrades, and a single pane of glass into the environment. EVO: RAIL leverages the same database as vCenter Server, so any changes to the configuration are also seen in vCenter Server and vice-versa.