Today (August 14th 2013) EMC released the latest version of the EMC Storage Integrator, version 3.0. I blogged about ESI a few weeks back and the PowerShell cmdlets that it offered:
https://www.codyhosterman.com/2013/07/29/scripting-esi-powershell-cmdlets-and-vmware/
This release fills in some of the gaps that were present in earlier versions–especially when it comes to VMAX storage provisioning. The flagship features of this release though are:
- Mailbox provisioning for Microsoft Exchange
- Database Availability Group (DAG) support with native or EMC RecoverPoint replication
- Storage control activities for Microsoft System Center Orchestrator.
One of the features that I was glad to see enhanced was VMAX provisioning. In earlier versions ESI would create the masking views itself and would not be able to provision to a host/cluster if the masking view was created by some other application like Solutions Enabler or Unisphere. The way it “knew” that was that it used a special naming convention for its initiator groups that would look something like this: esi_smi_ig_svpg-dell-c4-s04. Not really conducive to most naming conventions in use. The only workaround was to rename IGs to that convention which was less than ideal. ESI 3.0 no longer does this. ESI 3.0 will take the WWNs from the server you are provisioning from and then look to see if they both belong to any IG. If they do they than look to see if it belongs to a view and will provision the storage to it. Much more flexible. I would still like to see the ability to indicate the storage group or something to allow more control but this is a step in the right direction. One caveat though is that it does not seem to support cascaded IGs yet. It will fail to find that the IG is in a view if it happens to be cascaded into another IG that is in a view. So not perfect for clustered environments yet, but for single hosts.
Download it here:
https://download.emc.com/downloads/DL48560_EMC-Storage-Integrator-(ESI)-3.0-for-Windows-Suite.zip
See the Release Notes and Product Guide here: