VirtualPro

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

I’m currently revising for an EMC exam and part of the course material involves doing some training on the Navisphere simulator. No problems, except where on earth do you download the simulator software? I searched for ages before finding out that you only get access to it on EMC PowerLink if you are an EMC employee, partner or you have bought the relevant training.  I had done the latter but still couldn’t get it downloaded for some reason,  that’s when a google search turned up a link to the following page which required no credentials, EMC Education Services product simulators.  ** SEE UPDATE BELOW **

I managed to download the latest version for EMC Flare release 28 without issue.  I was however asked for my EMC PowerLink credentials when I first opened the simulator so perhaps that’s how it’s authenticated against the training purchased. It’s a really good learning aid and I’ve been able to find out how to do things on it that I wouldn’t have dared to attempt on our actual CLARiiON implementation. Hope this link helps someone who’s searching for this,  took me ages to find it.

**UPDATE**

It would appear that the link I had included in the original article is no longer working. Thanks to Mike for commenting on the post to alert me to the issue.  I’ve had a search around and Bas Raayman, one of my fellow GestaltIT authors has also written an article on the subject.  He has come up with an alternative means of downloading the simulators.

Basically go to the EMC Information and Storage Management web site by clicking the link.  Next click on one of the learning aids links,  you will now need to fill in some survey information but it’s a small price to pay to get free access to the simulators for both Navisphere, CLARiiON CX Series and Centera. Once the survey has been completed you can download various learning resources including the above mentioned simulators.  The registration step still exists when you first log on to the simulator,  you will at the very least require an EMC Powerlink logon to complete this step.

Certifications, Storage Certification, EMC, Navisphere

I was purusing twitter the other day (as you do) when I came across a link shared by @Stevie_Chambers of VMware.  The link was for a new free tool from EMC called Compliance Checker for VMware ESX, which as you might guess does exactly what  it’s title suggests.  The tool though EMC branded is actually by Configuresoft who EMC bought outright earlier this year following an existing OEM relationship.

Now some of you may be familiar with the Tripwire Config Check tool which allows you to scan your ESX servers security configuration, which in itself is a very handy tool.  This new tool from EMC appears to be a little more comprehensive in that it checks your ESX servers against both the VMware VI3 Security Hardening Guidelines  and the Centre for Internet Security VMware ESX Server 3.x benchmark.  Test results against both are backed with an extensive knowledge base of what the check is and the actions required to rectify the issue.

Included below are some screenshots of the Main interface, the reports returned and the knowledgebase articles you recieve when you click on any item in the report.

I must admit that these compliance checkers are handy because my Linux experience only began with ESX and sometimes the areas of security being checked are ones I wouldn’t have a clue about.  This is where the knowledgebase is great because it explains a little about what the check actually is as well as the actions required to rectify the issue.  Very handy because it would appear that a standard build of ESX 3.5 U4 is only 73% compliant as far as this piece of software is concerned.

To get your free copy of Compliance Checker for VMware ESX, click the link,  you’ll need to register but it’s a small price to pay for this handy tool.

ESX, New Products, VMware EMC, esx

Later this year I’ll be looking at moving our VMware environment across to a EMC CX4 system. I saw these posted before somewhere but could not remember who did it,  so I had to search for them all over again.  I’m personally interested in the Clariion document but the following links may come in handy for anyone else that is using Vmware on the Symmetrix or Celerra ranges.

These were all found using EMC’s documentation search which I will be adding to my favourites for future use.

TechBook: VMware ESX Server Using EMC Celerra Storage Systems Solutions Guide
TechBook: VMware ESX Server Using EMC CLARiiON Storage Systems Solutions Guide
TechBook: VMware ESX Server using EMC Symmetrix Storage Systems Solutions Guide

For my own personal reference,  I found some interesting documents on using EMC and QLogic HBA’s in both a Linux (ESX) and Windows environment.  These will come in handy as we use HP based Qlogic HBA’s and EMC storage,  maybe someone else may find them useful. 

** Please note that these documents appear to relate to a specific driver,  please check before using the content within **

EMC Fibre Channel and ISCSI with QLogic Host Bus Adapters in the Windows Environment
EMC Fibre Channel with QLogic Host Bus Adapters for the Linux Environment 

General EMC, QLogic, Storage