Tag: Symmetrix

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Scripting ESI PowerShell cmdlets and VMware

EMC offers a variety of tools to manage/enhance your virtual or physical environments–some free, some licensed. In most cases when you think of EMC tools for VMware one conjures up the free Virtual Storage Integrator which is more commonly referred to as VSI.

VSI is a great tool and continues to be improved through each version and allows you to provision storage, manage pathing, configure SRM etc. The one thing it does not have is a way to automate these tasks through an API or CLI. This is where another product comes in–one that many do not associate with VMware. The EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) is a lot of times seen as the Microsoft version of VSI–but that isn’t really true at all. While it might have started out that way and does indeed support Hyper-V and has a ton of Microsoft-specific features it is really the heterogeneous storage integrator. Importantly it  has a very handy and powerful feature–PowerShell cmdlets.

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Using VMware vCenter Log Insight with Symmetrix VMAX

A bit of a long one here. At some point this might turn into a white paper (update: it is now). But for now…

Check out my post on the Pure Storage integration with Log Insight here!

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UPDATE: We have released a content pack that automatically configures dashboards and fields for the VMAX, it will save you a lot of work and the pack is free! Read about it here:

https://www.codyhosterman.com/2013/08/09/the-vmax-content-pack-for-vmware-vcenter-log-insight/

And updated here:

http://drewtonnesen.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/auditing-with-the-vmax-content-pack-v1-5-1/

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Earlier this summer VMware announced a new product called vCenter Log Insight which just went GA today. You can download it and try it out from here:

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-log-insight/

insight

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Point-in-time test recovery with SRDF and VMware SRM

As many are probably aware, RecoverPoint 4.0 recently released support for Point-In-Time test recovery and recovery for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. In conjunction with the RP SRA and the Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) users can select a PiT in the past instead of automatically being forced to use the latest copy.

Since this came out (and many times prior) I have been asked can we do this with the SRDF SRA and TimeFinder along with VMware SRM? The answer is yes! The process though is somewhat different of course. By far this question is mostly targeted for test recovery only, as most conversely prefer up-to-date images when they actually failover. So this post will focus on test recovery. Continue reading “Point-in-time test recovery with SRDF and VMware SRM”

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First post and a quick SYMCLI shortcut

First post! As I am fooling around with the templates and colors and such and getting used to blogging I figured I would kick things off with something simple and one of my favorite unheralded new features of Solutions Enabler (SYMCLI) 7.6 that was released at EMC World 2013: “quick meta creation”.

****UPDATE: Apparently this was enabled long before SE 7.6, SE 7.3 at least actually, so you probably already have this feature, thanks to Jason Moreland for pointing this out****

As anyone familiar with the VMAX is most likely aware Symmetrix logical devices have a size limit of 240 GB. And in most virtual environments the size of clustered file systems that are desired, such as VMFS, usually need to be much bigger than that. So the solution on the VMAX array is to create what we call a metavolume (which I will refer to as a meta henceforth because I am a lazy typist). This is a simple logical association of multiple VMAX devices and are manipulated to look like one larger device which allows the size of a device as seen by the host to be VERY large (255 total members possible x 240 GB size each–you do the math). These devices can be “connected” together either via concatenation or via striping.

Well of course this is old news, why is this the least bit interesting?

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