Quick post here. On February 10th, EMC released a service release for VMAX arrays which is code level 5876.268.174. You can find the release notes here:
Note that this is not yet a target level so this is not a required code upgrade at this point. Also, there are no new features or major enhancements to Enginuity in this release. It is simply a service release intended to aggregate minor fixes and enhancements that have been discovered and resolved since the last major code release.
I won’t go into detail on every fix/enhancement–that is what the release notes are for. But I will highlight one that is related to VMware since I blog about VMware quite often.
Fix 67586 “improves the performance of the XCOPY command used by the VM-Clone and Storage vMotion operations.”
In other words this fix helps speed up VMware VAAI Full Copy operations through some data handling changes in the VMAX DAs. Now some customers may not benefit from this and some will–so don’t expect night and day differences once loaded. This fix seems to help XCOPY sessions with thin virtual disks the most. So if you are using those types of disks and could use a small speed boost talk to your EMC team about upgrading your Enginuity.
Other than that take a look at the release notes and see if any of the fixes or enhancements might be right for your environment.
Oh and a little levity: For those who haven’t seen it (I just recently did at VMware PEX) check out this parody video featuring Brian Gallagher of the famous Jean Claude Van Damme video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0nyBz4tnOI