Finally procured a pass to EMC World 2014 and I am very excited to attend–this will be my 5th one in a row! Once again EMC World is in Las Vegas–you still have time to sign up–so if you haven’t please do! This post is going to center around session suggestions, I will do another concerning the goings-on at EMC World that are of note closer to the start of the conference. 
Continue reading “EMC World 2014: Some Session Suggestions!”
Congrats to all of the 2014 vExperts!
Just wanted to take a moment to congratulate all of the 2014 VMware vExperts! I am honored to be counted amongst their number for the second year in a row. A very nice recognition of being active in the VMware community that comes with a lot of perks at conferences, through technology previews/betas and much more.
Firewall requirements for EMC VSI 6.1 for vSphere Web Client
As you might have read on my blog a few days ago, EMC released an updated version of the Virtual Storage Integrator tool for vSphere Web Client that supports direct provisioning and some management of VNX and VMAX storage. The previous version supported ViPR-only provisioning. If you didn’t see that post you can check it out here. Inevitably when a product involves cross-application and importantly cross-server integration many customers ask the question about what are the firewall requirements to get this thing to work? Let’s take a look.
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Virtual Storage Integrator for vSphere Web Client
Today the long-awaited update to Virtual Storage Integrator for the vSphere Web Client as been released! Six months or so ago EMC released the first iteration of the VSI Web Client (version 6.0) that supported provisioning of storage but only for environments enabled with ViPR. The latest release (version 6.1) now adds support for direct provisioning of storage from a VMAX or VNX array.
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The EMC Enterprise Private Cloud 2.0
Increasingly, organizations, small and large, are attempting to or at least considering to implement some type of cloud-based architecture into their IT infrastructure. The benefits of tight integration, intelligent abstraction of resources, seamless automation and orchestration are becoming quite apparent. These benefits and the desire to obtain them are causing customers and partners to look at vendors such as EMC for such a solution. Importantly, a solution that doesn’t require re-invention of the wheel or painstaking initial setup.
Symmetrix VMAX and Splunk introduction
My colleague Jonas Rosland (@virtualswede) has been doing some great work with Splunk recently (check out a post from his blog here) and it got me to want to get my own hands a little dirty. So far I’ve only scratched the surface on what can be done with Splunk but I decided to put a post together on some basics. For this post I am going to talk about Symmetrix VMAX logs and how to get those into Splunk.
Required network ports for Python ScaleIO install on Windows
I just posted about using the EMC-provided Python script to install and configure ScaleIO on Windows. Using this script makes these steps much easier, especially in very large environments (you can find that post here). One of the next logical questions is concerning firewall requirements and this process. To achieve this automation, the script is going all over the place connecting to servers, copying files, starting services and issuing configuration commands. Therefore it is hitting a variety of network ports on the target hosts. So let’s talk about what exactly those ports are.
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Installing ScaleIO 1.21 in a Windows Environment
A few weeks ago the latest version of ScaleIO was released (version 1.21) and one of the major new features of it was official Windows Server support. ScaleIO 1.21 supports the following flavors of Windows:
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- Windows Server 2012
- Windows Server 2012 R2
Continue reading “Installing ScaleIO 1.21 in a Windows Environment”
Service release SRDF SRA 5.5.1.0 for VMware Site Recovery Manager
As I wrote about in a recent post the 5.1 version of the SRDF Storage Replication Adapter was updated in a service release. Similar fixes and a few other changes have been also added to the SRDF SRA version 5.5. If you are running VMware Site Recovery Manager version 5.1 or 5.5 this is the SRA you should be using. SRM 5.0 users can only use the 5.1 SRA (while the 5.1 SRA supports SRM 5.0 and 5.1 I recommend SRM 5.1 users use the 5.5 SRA).
So what’s new in the latest SR for SRDF SRA (5.5.1.0)?
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Virtual Storage Integrator 5.6.2 Released AppSync and USM
A new version of the EMC Virtual Storage Integrator 5.6.3 has been released for the following VSI features:
- AppSync–Allows you to manage service plans and datastore copies (mount, unmount, copy, restore etc.)
- Unified Storage Management–Provision storage from VPLEX, VMAX, VNX, VNXe from the vSphere Client
Now obviously this is a minor release and doesn’t include revolutionary changes but for users of these VSI features is worth the upgrade.
Continue reading “Virtual Storage Integrator 5.6.2 Released AppSync and USM”