Expanding a ScaleIO Volume in a VMware environment

In my last blog post I wrote about how to provision a new volume from ScaleIO to your VMware environment so the next logical step is what do you do when that volume is completely consumed. Well you have to options; provision a new volume or expand an existing one. Since the former option was covered in my last post, let’s look at the second option.

VMware vSphere has offered the ability to dynamically expand VMFS volumes since, well, vSphere was introduced (version 4.0). VMFS Volume Grow allows ESXi to recognize when a physical device has expanded in capacity and enables an administrator to non-disruptively expand the VMFS volume to take advantage of the extra space without resorting to using messy extents.

Continue reading “Expanding a ScaleIO Volume in a VMware environment”

Adding capacity to ScaleIO in a VMware environment

When initially installing/configuring ScaleIO in a VMware environment the creation of a storage pool and adding capacity to it is included in the setup process. Obviously every time you want to add a storage pool, add capacity or simply create a new volume you don’t want to have to run the setup process again–that would be silly. And of course you do not have to, nor should you. So how do you add more capacity without adding additional nodes? Let’s find out!

My current environment has four ESXi hosts and one SDS/SDC VM per host (my SDCs and SDSs are the same VM in my environment). Each SDS currently has one virtual disk using the full capacity of a VMFS on top of a physical disk. The plan is to double the capacity of each SDS by adding a new physical disk to each ESXi host and presenting the full capacity (minus the space on the disk reserved for VMFS metadata) via a virtual disk to each SDS. The below image shows the current environment for one ESXi host and also how it will look after the capacity is added.

scaleio_environment Continue reading “Adding capacity to ScaleIO in a VMware environment”

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”