VirtualPro

So I haven’t done a lot of real time blogging at VMworld this year as I’ve been busy trying to see and soak up as much as possible.  It’s not every day that you get access to the likes of Chad Sakacc (VP EMC / VMware alliance) Scott Drummond (EMC – ex VMware performance team) and a whole host of other technology movers and shakers. As you can imagine I took full advantage of these opportunities and blogging became a bit of secondary activity this week.

However, I’ve now had time to reflect and one of the most interesting areas I covered this week which was the new storage features in vSphere 4.1. I had the chance to cover these in multiple sessions, see various demo’s and talk about it with the VMware developers and engineers responsible. There are two main features I want to cover in depth as I feel they are important indicators of the direction that storage for VMware is heading.

SIOC – Storage I/O Control

SIOC had been in the pipeline since VMworld 2009, I wrote an article on it previously called VMware DRS for Storage, slightly presumptuous of me at the time but I was only slightly off the mark. For those of you who are not aware of SIOC, to sum it up again at a very high level let’s start with the following statement from VMware themselves.

SIOC provides a dynamic control mechanism for proportional allocation of shared storage resources to VMs running on multiple hosts

Though you have always been able to add disk shares to VM’s on an ESX host, this only applied to that host, it was incapable of taking account of VM I/O Behaviour of other VMs on other hosts. Storage I/O control is different in that it is enabled on the datastore object itself, disk shares can then be assigned per VM inside that datastore. When a pre-defined latency level is exceeded on a VM it begins to throttle I/O based on the shares assigned to each VM.

How does it do this, what is happening in the background here? Well SIOC is aware of the storage array device level queue slots as well as the latency of workloads.  During periods of contention it decides how it can best keep machines below the predefined latency tolerance by manipulating all the ESX Host I/O Queues that affect that datastore.

In the example below you can see that based on disk share value all VM’s should ideally be making the same demands on the storage array device level queue slots.  Without SIOC enabled that does not happen. With SIOC enabled it begins throttling back the use of the second ESX host’s I/O queue from 24 slots to 12 slots, thus equalising the I/O across the hosts.

Paul Manning (Storage Architect - VMware product marketing) indicated during his session that there was a benefit to turning SIOC on and not even amending default share values.  This configuration would immediately introduce an element of I/O fairness across a datastore as shown in the example described above and shown below.

So this functionality is now available in vSphere 4.1 for Enterprise Plus licence holders only.  There are a few immediate caveats to be aware of, it’s only supported with block level storage (FC or ISCSI) so NFS datastores are not supported. It also does not support RDM’s or datastores constructed of extents, it only supports a 1:1 LUN to datastore mapping. I was told that extents can cause issues with how the latency and throughput values are calculated,  which could in turn lead to false positive I/O throttling, as a result they are not supported yet.

It’s a powerful feature which I really like the look of. I personally worry about I/O contention and the lack of control I have over what happens to those important mission critical VM’s when that scenario occurs. The “Noisy Neighbour” element can be dealt with at CPU and Memory level with shares but until now you couldn’t at a storage level. I have previously resorted to purchasing EMC PowerPath/VE to double the downstream I/O available from each host and thus reduce the chances of contention.  I may just rethink that one in future because of SIOC!

Further detailed information can be found in the following VMware technical documents

SIOC – Technical Overview and Deployment Considerations

Managing Performance Variance of applications using SIOC

VMware performance engineering – SIOC Performance Study

VAAI - vStorage API for Array Integration

Shortly before the vSphere 4.1 announcement I listened to an EMC webcast run by Chad Sakacc.  In this webcast he described EMC’s integration with the new vStorage API, specifically around offloading tasks to the array. So what does all this mean, what exactly is being offloaded?

 
So what do these features enable? Let’s take a look at them one by one.

Hardware assisted locking as described above provides improved LUN metadata locking.  This is very important for increasing VM to datastore density.  If we use the example of VDI boot storms, if only the blocks relevant to the VM being powered on are locked then you can have a more VM’s starting per datastore.  The same applies in a dynamic VDI environment where images are being cloned and then spun up; the impact of busy cloning periods, i.e. first thing in the morning is mitigated.

The full copy feature would also have an impact in the dynamic VDI space, cloning of machines taking a fraction of the time as the ESX host is not involved. What I mean by that is when a clone is taken now, the data has to be copied up to the ESX server and then pushed back down to the new VM storage location.  The same occurs when you do a storage vMotion, doing it without VAAI takes up valuable I/O Bandwidth and ESX CPU clock cycles. Offloading this to the array prevents this use of host resource and in tests has resulted in a saving of 99% on I/O traffic and 50% saving on CPU load.

In EMC Labs a test of storage vMotion was carried out with VAAI turned off, it took 2 mins 21 seconds.  The same test was tried again with VAAI enabled, this time the storage vMotion took 27 seconds to complete. That is a 5x improvement, and EMC have indicated that they have had a 10x improvement in some cases. Check out this great video which shows a storage vMotion and the impact on ESX and the underlying array.

There is also a 4th VAAI feature which has been left in the vStorage API but is currently unavailable, Mike Laverick wrote about it here. Its a Thin Provisioning API and Chad Sakacc explained during the group session that its main use is for Thin on Thin storage scenarios. The vStorage API will in the future provide vCenter insight into array level over provisioning as well as the VMware over provisioning.  It will also be used to proactively stun VM’s as opposed to letting them crash as currently happens.

As far as I knew EMC was the only storage vendor offering array compatibility with VAAI. Chad indicated that they are already working on VAAI v2 looking to add additional hardware offload support as well as NFS Support. It would appear that 3Par offer support, so that kind of means HP do to, right? Vaughan Stewart over at NetApp also blogged about their upcoming support of the VAAI, I’m sure all storage vendors will be rushing to make use of this functionality.

Further detailed information can be found at the following locations.

What does VAAI mean to you? – Chad Sakac EMC

EMC VAAI webcast – Chad Sakac EMC

Storage DRS – the future

If you’ve made it this far through the blog post then the fact we are taking about Storage DRS should come as no great surprise.  We’ve talked about managing I/O performance through disk latency monitoring and talked about array offloaded features such as storage vMotion and hardware assisted locking. These features in unison make Storage DRS an achievable reality.

SIOC brings the ability to measure VM latency, thus giving a set of metrics that can be used for storage DRS.  VMware are planning to add capacity to the storage DRS algorithm and then aggregate the two metrics for placement decisions.  This will ensure a storage vMotion of an underperforming VM does not lead to capacity issues and vice versa.

Hardware Assisted Locking in VAAI means we don’t have to be as concerned about the number of VM’s in a datastore, something you have to manage manually at the moment.  This removal of limitation means we can automate better, a storage DRS enabler if you will.

Improved Storage vMotion response due to VAAI hardware offloading means that the impact of storage DRS is minimised at the host level. This is one less thing for the VMware administrator to worry about and hence smoothes the path for storage DRS Adoption.  As you may have seen in the storage vMotion video above the overhead on the backend array also appears to have been reduced, so you’re not just shifting the problem somewhere else.

For more information I suggest checking out the following (VMworld 2010 account needed)

TA7805 – Tech Preview – Storage DRS

Summary

There is so much content to take in across all three of these subjects I feel that I have merely scratched the surface.  What was abundantly clear from the meetings and session I attended at VMworld is that VMware and EMC are working closely to bring us easy storage tiering at the VMware level.  Storage DRS will be used to create graded / tiered data pools at the vCenter level, pools of similar type datastores (RAID, Disk type). Virtual machines will be created in these pools; auto placed and then moved about within that pool of datastores to ensure capacity and performance. 

In my opinion it’s an exciting technology, one I think simplifies life for the VMware administrator but complicates life for the VMware designer. It’s another performance variable to concern yourself with and as I heard someone in the VMworld labs comment “it’s a loaded shotgun for those that don’t know what they’re doing”.  Myself, I’d be happy to use it now that I have taken the time to understand it; hopefully this post has made it a little clearer for you to.

Gestalt-IT, Storage, VMware, vmworld EMC, Storage, VAAI, VSphere

 
I currently find myself sitting rather bored on the flight across to San Francisco for VMworld.  Just to clarify, it’s certainly not the thought of VMworld that’s boring me, far from it in fact!Instead it’s the rather poor choice of in flight movies that’s got me thinking about what this VMworld is going to bring us and what am I going to take away from it at the end of the week.

It’s now been 3 years since my last VMworld visit and in that time things have moved on significantly in the industry. Back in 2007 VMware really had no competitors, Hyper-V hadn’t even been released yet. The phrase Cloud computing wasn’t being mentioned at every opportunity and the likes of VMware Fault Tolerance and Storage vMotion were still confined to the stage as keynote demo technologies. It’s mind boggling to think how much has changed in those 3 short years, what a very different landscape it now is!

So I’m wondering what can we expect from VMworld 2010?  Well there has been plenty of speculation that VMware will announce View 4.5,  I’m now taking that one as a given as it has been so widely commented on already. I’m also expecting lots on private and public cloud infrastructures and the transformation steps required to take it from concept to the real deal. All the big IT companies in the world are working towards this model, the concept is out there and now very much on the loose. I’m hearing more chatter about it from people who don’t even work in IT!  On the Cloud front I am expecting to hear lots about how to overcome the fears, the risks involved, the security concerns and all those other things that have the sceptics worried and concerned. Oh and you just know that VMware will have a few little extra special announcements hidden up their sleeve, it wouldn’t be a VMworld without them.

From my own perspective I have a few angles to cover this year. My employer is the one funding my attendance and therefore I have a number of specific topics I need to cover off as part of my day job. Deploying Exchange 2010 in a vSphere environment for instance is one key area and another is looking at the transition from ESX to ESXi in advance of the service console retirement.  On top of this I will be looking at the longer term strategic view, where is the industry going and are we pulling in the same direction or  do we need to change tact?

As an aside, I have also been asked to present to the Scotland VMware User Group upon my return to the UK.  The theme for the VMUG being “VMworld looking back, looking forward” which is meant to cover VMworld US and my experience of it, while also encouraging people to attend the VMworld Europe event in Copenhagen.  Hopefully there will be plenty of good content for me to report back on but enough announcements held over to make VMworld Europe in Copenhagen appealing.

It’s shaping up to be a great week, I’m looking forward to getting stuck in tomorrow first thing. I Just hope the jet lag doesn’t hit me to hard as I have a feeling the various vendor parties and ad-hoc beers just might!

Events, VMware, vmworld VMUG, vmworld, VMworld 2010

So it’s that time again, another Scottish VMware User Group meeting is upon us.  This time there is a slight difference, I’m actually presenting which I have to say is not daunting in the slightest?!?!

I’ve been asked to present on my experience at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, an event I am looking forward to immensely.  I’ll be aiming to tell you all about VMworld, it’s format, what I did there and why you should invest both the time and the money to attend future events.

If you are interested in registering for this VMUG meeting please register soon, I have it on good authority that 50% of the places were snapped up within 24 hours of the invite going out. Hopefully I’ll see you there.

Please join us for the upcoming Scottish VMware User Group meeting on Thursday, September 23rd.

This is a great opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices and the latest technology.

Agenda
13:00	Registration
13:30	Introduction (Scott Walkingshaw)
13:45	VNews (Alistair Sutherland)
14:00	VMware Speaker
15:00	Coffee/Networking
15:30	VMworld 2010 Customer Presentation (Craig Stewart/Martin Currie)
16:30	Close

The theme of the meeting will be "VMworld 2010 – Looking Back/Looking Forward." Come to network and share ideas with an innovative group of VMware users as you learn how to get the most out of your attendance at VMworld EMEA, and to get a brief overview of the highlights that will by then have been covered at VMworld US.

Events, VMware Scottish VMUG, VMUG

I was lucky enough last week to be involved in a Gestalt IT conference call with Symantec.  The conference call was designed to give us all a sneak preview of what Symantec were planning to announce at VMworld 2010 in a couple of weeks.  Unfortunately it was under embargo, that is until today!

There were a couple of announcements being made, Symantec introduced a new NFS storage product called VirtualStore and made some further announcements about NetBackup 7 and new VMware specific features.  However the most interesting announcement on the call for me was the release of Symantec Application HA for VMware.

Symantec have been looking at why customers are not going “the last mile” with virtualisation.  Why are customers not deploying their Tier 1 applications on their virtual platforms? Symantec’s view on this was that customers still have issues with application level failure within guest VM’s.  This product has been designed to fill that void and at present is a product with no real competitors.

As the call progressed the current HA options were described by Symantec and discussed by the group. The obvious one is VMware HA which covers a physical host failure event. Within the VMware HA product there is also VM monitoring which covers you in the event of an OS level failure event, such as a  blue screen.  Then you can of course employ other technologies such as OS level clustering, however you then have to take heed of caveats that hinder the ability to use features such as vMotion and DRS.

I’m always sceptical when I see new virtualisation products, one of my fears is that companies are attempting to just jump on the crest of the wave that is virtualisation. Symantec are obviously a bit more established than your average company, but as always the jury is out until we see a final product doing the business for real.  It transpired during the call that the product is actually based on Symantec Veritas Cluster Server,  a product with a long history in application availability.

Veritas Cluster Server has a lot of in built trigger scenarios for common products such as Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange Server and  IIS.  On top of this built in, out of the box support Symantec also have a VCS development kit allowing for custom scenarios to be written.  I like this approach,  it reminds me of F5 Networks use of the customer community to support the writing of custom rules and features for their product.  If a custom rule or feature has enough demand then they spend the time developing it into their product range.    Perhaps Symantec could look at leveraging their customer base and community in this way and improve the support around VCS trigger scenarios.  One other potential use of the VCS SDK that springs to mind is for application vendors who are making specialist software, CRM, ERP, Finance systems, etc.  They could look to build in Application HA into pre-configured virtual appliances, that would be a great selling point for any software vendor.

The deployment of the product itself takes the form of a guest deployment / agent. Technical deep dive information on the exact integration between the Symantec product and VMware was thin on the ground.  However there was mention of Symantec’s integration with the VMware HA API,  something that I don’t think has been announced by VMware just yet.  The description given to us during the call was that if Symantec Application HA failed to restart the application it could send a downstream API call to VMware HA and ask it to restart the VM’s Operating System.  An interesting concept, something I am sure we’ll hear more about at VMworld.

Licensing for this new product is quite competitive, $350 per virtual machine, a small price to pay for ensuring your Tier 1 application recovery is automated.  Symantec have promised full integration with vCenter Server and the screenshot below shows Symantec Application HA in action monitoring a SQL 2008 server, click on the thumbnail to see a full size image.

If you would like to learn more about Application HA, then get along to VMware and Symantec’s break out session at VMworld. - http://www.vmworld.com/docs/DOC-4658

Alternatively you can listen to a Podcast from Symantec’s Niraj Zaveri discussing the new product.  - http://www.symantec.com/podcasts/detail.jsp?podid=ent_application_ha

General, Gestalt-IT, New Products, VMware HA, Symantec, VMware

VMworld 2010 in San Francisco is fast approaching and promises to be a fantastic event. I have two questions for you.

        - If you are not attending already would you like to?

        - Would you like someone else to pay for you to go?

I think the obvious answer to both those questions is a resounding YES!  So how do you take advantage of this very, very special offer?  Well over at Gestalt IT my friend Stephen Foskett has arranged a spectacular competition supported exclusively by the four vendors shown below.

How To Enter

Get yourself over to the VMworld contest extension page on the Gestalt IT web site and get over there quickly.  You will need to fill out the entry form by close of play Thursday the 12th of August, most importantly you need to tell us how you are going to “Pay it forward".  What does this mean,  well the following extract explains what we expect from competition entrants.

There’s always a catch, right? Inspired by winner Greg Stuart‘s desire to contribute to the community, we’re not just going to pick a winner at random. We’re going to pick the person who presents the best case for themselves.

Entrants must explain how they plan to “pay it forward” if they get to go to VMworld. Will you start a blog? Write some tutorials? Contribute to a forum or online community? Present to your local VMUG? Get creative and spread the wealth of knowledge you get from the event!

Our panel of judges is made up of none other than the most-excellent roster of past Tech Field Day delegates! They’ve proven themselves to be independent-minded and knowledgeable, and we’re sure that they will pick the best entries!

It’s pretty simple and at present there are not quite as many entries as you’d think.  Get involved people, it’s not going to take you long and could end on a nice trip to San Francisco for one of the highlights of the IT calendar.  I look forward to reading the entries and helping decide the winner!

Events, General, VMware Competition, vmworld, VMworld 2010

I spotted an issue in my vSphere infrastructure this weekend just past. I noticed that one of the main development boxes was showing the dreaded question, redo log out of space, retry or abort?

As it turned out VMware Data Recovery Manager had taken a snapshot as part of it’s back up routine and had failed when trying to remove it.  This coupled with a scheduled SQL maintenance plan caused the delta files for the snapshot to grow to over 250GB in little over 12 hours.

I eventually overcame the issue by adding an extent to the out of space VMFS datastore, this gave me an extra 160GB with which to play the logs back in.  I then used the very handy SnapVMX utility to tell me how much space was required to replay the delta files.  Luckily for me it only required 20 GB as sometimes it can require as much as the size of the original disk. After the snapshot was merged I did a bit of Storage vMotion and reworked the datastore to get rid of the extent (I’m not a fan of using them)

This particular incident was unfortunately unavoidable, it happened at a weekend, was due to VMDR’s failure to remove a snapshot it had created and unfortunately clashed with a disk intensive operation. It did get me thinking though, although I am careful with snapshots and there usage who else in the organisation is not? how do we mitigate this potential risk?

Snapshots are a handy feature, I generally only use them for short periods of time, usually to provide a rollback when patching or changing configurations. Misuse or mismanagement of snapshots can quite quickly lead to problems, something that a recent blog article from VMware Support deals with quite effectively. Entitled ESX Anatomy 101 it’s a must read for anyone trying to gain a good basic understanding of how VMware snapshot work.

I myself have taken a two pronged attack to preventing snapshots causing problems. The first approach is to schedule a very basic PowerShell script that I found on the blog site of Axiom Dynamics.  This simple little script queries your vCenter server for all current snapshots and then sends an email detailing them.  A simple but effective means of keeping an eye on snapshots across the virtual infrastructure.

The second more proactive approach is to use a vCenter alarm at the data centre level to alert when a VM is running from a snapshot. This alarm simply involves emailing a warning when any snapshot is larger than 2GB. This handy video taken from VMware Knowledgebase article 1018029 describes in detail how to set this up, the KB itself also provides step by step instructions.

Alternatives 

There are a number of alternatives available for reporting on snapshots.

Alan Renouf’s Snapshot Reminder – A Powershell script that integrates with AD to send the creator of a snapshot a little reminder when the snapshot is over 2 weeks old.

Alan Renouf’s vCheck Daily Report – Another Powershell script that reports on a large number of areas within the virtual infrastructure.  One of those areas includes snapshots

RVTools – A very handy .Net application by Rob de Veij  that can be used to query your virtual infrastructure for just about everything. You will notice in the screenshot below the vSnapshot tab which should help you identify those rogue snapshots.

In summary,  everyone who works with snapshots should have an understanding of their usage and limitations.  Obviously you can’t always rely on people to do things right, we are only human after all. As a safeguard ensure you have some level of reporting and alerting in place to help you prevent those annoying and time consuming out of space issues occurring.

VI Toolkit / Powershell, VMware powershell, snapshots, vCenter, VMware

Following a recent implementation of VMware Data Recovery manager we ran into a few issues.  We eventually had to kill the virtual appliances due to the issue we were having and as a result we had a couple of virtual machines with outstanding snapshots.  These snapshots were taken by VDR and as a result could not be viewed or deleted using the snapshot manager.

We raised a call with VMware support and they started a WebEx session to look at the issue.  I always love watching VMware support personnel operating at the service console level, I always pick up a command or two that I didn’t know before.  On this occasion the support engineer was using something called SnapVMX to view the hierarchy of snapshots at the virtual disk level.

At first I thought this was an inbuilt VMware command but it turns out it’s not. It was actually a little piece of code that was written by Ruben Garcia.  What does it do?  well the following extract from the download pages explains it pretty well.

• Displays snapshots structure and size of snapshots for every disk on that VM
• Calculates free space needed to commit snapshots for the worst case scenario
• Checks the CID chain of the analysed files and displays a warning if broken.

I’ve included a little demo screenshot to show what it can do. On the left hand side is  a screenshot from Snapshot Manager within vCenter.  On the right hand side is the same VM being viewed with SnapVMX in the service console.  Put the two together and you get a better idea of the snapshot disk hierarchy and the size of each snapshot.

The other interesting feature is that it tells you what space is required to commit the snapshots.  So for example, say you had taken 5 snapshots of a machine as it was being built and configured.  Say that the overall effect of those 5 snapshots is to fill up your VMFS datastore completely. Chances are that you’re not going to be able to commit the snapshots within the current VMFS datastore.  SnapVMX will be able to tell you the worse case scenario on how much space would be required to commit the snapshots.  Armed with this information you could cold migrate to another datastore that has at least that amount of free space in order to allow you to commit the snapshots.  The screenshot below isn’t the best but the best I could do due to the length of the statement.

For the download and full documentation on how to use this piece of code head over to the following web site. Worth a look if you’re a big user of snapshots.

http://geosub.es/vmutils/SnapVMX.Documentation/SnapVMX.Documentation.html

While searching for a link to Ruben Garcia to put on this article I found that he has a blog site and within that I found a link to a superb troubleshooting VM snapshot problems article which I will definitely be keeping a link to and suggest you check out.  Truly excellent stuff Ruben!

General, Gestalt-IT, VMware Datastore, snapshots, VMFS, VMware, VSphere

After a couple of weeks of speculation VMware have today announced their latest VCAP certifications.  VMware have introduced two VMware Certified Advanced Professional exams for holders of the current VCP4 certification. These two new exams cover administration and design and are pre-requisites of the new VCDX4-DCD qualification.  I’ve been waiting for this announcement for a month now as I’ve been keen to work towards VCDX, however wasn’t keen to do it on VI3. To find out more information on the two new certifications as well as the VCDX4 qualification click the links below, or see the updated FAQ page on VMware’s site.

VCAP – Datacenter Administration

The VCAP4-DCA is directed toward System Administrators, Consultants and Technical Support Engineers who can demonstrate their skills in VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter technologies in relation to the datacenter, as well as their knowledge of application and physical-infrastructure services and their integration with the virtual infrastructure.

VCAP – Datacenter Design

The VCAP-DCD is directed toward IT Architects and Consulting Architects who are capable of designing VMware solutions in a multi-site, large enterprise environment.  They have a deep understanding both of VMware core components and their relation to storage and networking, and also of datacenter design methodologies. They also possess knowledge of applications and physical infrastructure, as well as their relationship to the virtual infrastructure

VCDX4 – Datacenter Design

VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) is the highest level of VMware certification. This elite group is comprised of design architects highly-skilled in VMware enterprise deployments and the program is designed for veteran professionals who want to validate and demonstrate their expertise in VMware virtual infrastructure.

Certifications, VMware Certification, Certifications, VCAP, VCAP-DCA, VCAP-DCD, VCDX, VCDX4, VCDX4-DCD, VMware

Every tech geek loves making Visio diagrams, admit it you do! I for one love nothing more than scribbling a design down on paper, tweaking and fine tuning it and then bringing it to life in a nice Visio diagram.  My original virtualisation Visio post back in 2008 is one of my most popular so I thought I would revisit it and update it for 2010. I’ve taken the opportunity to expand it to include Hyper-V and Citrix virtualisation products as well as a few other useful stencils.

VMware

VMware Official icons and Images – This is PowerPoint format but really quite good.

VMware Visio Stencil – This was on VIOPS but was removed, this is an alternative link.

vEcoShell VMware Visio Template

VMware VI3 Server Configuration Template

Veeam Visio Stencils for Visio 2003 and 2007

VMGuru Virtualisation template

Microsoft

Jonathan Cusson’s Hyper-V template

Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Professional Add-In for Rack Server Virtualization (Virtual Rack)

Microsoft App-V Visio Stencil

Citrix

Citrix Dynamic Delivery Center Visio Stencil – XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer, WANScaler,etc

Non Virtualisation Products

Cisco Data Centre Visio stencils

Exchange 2007 Visio stencil

Office Communications Server 2007 and 2007 R2 Visio Stencils

Brocade Visio Stencil

VisioCafe – Good Selection of hardware vendor Visio stencils, HP, EMC NetApp, etc

Citrix, Microsoft, VMware Citrix, hyper-v, Microsoft, Stencils, virtualisation, virtualization, visio, Visio Stencils

I have been trying desperately this week to keep up to date with the latest announcements coming out of EMC World 2010.  Problem is they appear to be making them and blogging about them faster than I can read and assimilate them.

One blog post that did catch my attention was a post by EMC’s Chad Sakac. Chad constantly amazes me, he generates a massive amount of super high quality technical content for the EMC and VMware community. His blog post was entitled “EMC’s next generation vCenter Plugins” and details the latest and greatest offerings from EMC’s Free vCenter plugins.

The Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) V3.0.0 is a renaming of the existing EMC Storage Viewer 2.1 plugin that has been available for a while.  Why the rename? Well EMC are introducing tighter integration by enabling storage provisioning from within vCenter, it’s now surpassed being just a storage viewer.  The storage provisioning integration works with the CLARiiON across all protocols (FC, ISCSI, FCOE) and it also works with NFS on the Celerra. It also adds greater degrees of simplicity and reduces risk by automating all the tasks involved in provisioning and presenting storage to your vSphere cluster.

Chad explains it in much more detail and much better than I ever could in the following video.

I personally feel that the benefits of EMC’s ownership and tight working relationship with vSphere are beginning to shine through.  Such tight levels of integration are now being delivered and future development doesn’t look likely to slow down either. The quote from Chad below show’s how aggressively his team are working to constantly bring new features to the table and best of all, there completely free!

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (or VSI) is the main EMC vCenter plug-in.  Over time, more and more functions that currently require installing one or more additional plugins will fold into the EMC Virtual Storage Integrator.  We’re beefing up the team behind it, and they have a very aggressive roadmap (wait till you see what’s next!!!)

Click the link below to find out more about what vCenter plugins are available, what they’re designed to do and where you can download them from in EMC Powerlink.

Storage, VMware, vSphere EMC, Plugins, vCenter, VSI, VSphere