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. 
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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.
Minor update to the SRDF and SRM techbook
Quick post here. As some of you may or may not know, the SRDF and VMware Site Recovery Manager techbook that I have “owned” for four years or so is now out of my hands since I moved onto a different role within EMC. Drew Tonnesen (drewtonnesen.wordpress.com) from Symmetrix Engineering is now the author of the book. Anyways the techbook has been updated to include the latest changes included in the SRDF SRA version 5.5.1 which we released a few weeks ago.
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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/config of EMC ScaleIO on Windows using the Python script
In previous posts I have discussed installing and configuring EMC ScaleIO on Windows using manual methods. In VMware or pure Linux environments I have used the provided Python script/wizard to help automate the installation and configuration of ScaleIO. Mostly due to the fact that using this script is much simpler and less-error prone than using the manual methods. And in my opinion, at least, should be the preferred method of installation when possible.
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Unattended/silent deployment of ScaleIO features on Windows Server
Two posts in two days. Phew! So much to talk about, but this is a quick one. In my previous post I wrote about installing ScaleIO on Windows hosts via a manual/user-controlled process using the CLI and running the MSI install file on each server. In larger environments this may not be practical where an automated deployment solution is required. Furthermore, it is invariably necessary to also deploy the software in a “silent” unattended mode so that end-users do not need to interact with the installer. Luckily this is a pretty simple process in Windows environments using the MSI ScaleIO installer.
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