VSI – Cody Hosterman

April 1, 2014

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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March 28, 2014

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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January 21, 2014

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.

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October 30, 2013

Virtual Storage Integrator: Symmetrix SRA Utilities 5.6

Late last week I posted a summary blog on the latest SRDF Storage Replication Adapter for VMware Site Recovery Manager here:

https://www.codyhosterman.com/2013/10/25/updated-srdf-storage-replication-adapter-released-for-srm-5-5/

I detailed out the new features etc for the 5.5 release and briefly mentioned the latest release of the Virtual Storage Integrator Symmetrix SRA Utilities that helps users configure the SRDF SRA. On 10/25, we posted the latest release of the SRA Utilities, version 5.6.

Version 5.6 of the SRA Utilities have been enhanced in tandem with the SRDF SRA to support the new features that the SRA has to offer. Most of these enhancements relate to the masking control functionality that is newly supported by the SRA.

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September 23, 2013

Virtual Storage Integrator 5.6: VPLEX Provisioning

I’m (Drew Tonnesen, @drewtonnesen) back for another guest post, this time continuing Cody’s theme of VSI 5.6. Besides the much anticipated (and long awaited) striped meta capability in Unified Storage Management (USM) 5.6 for VMAX, there is now VPLEX provisioning! For those of us who use VPLEX with VMware this simplifies the creation of datastores on VPLEX.

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September 16, 2013

Virtual Storage Integrator 5.6: Provisioning VMAX Striped Metas

Hey all! So as many of you have heard we (EMC) has released the latest version of the Virtual Storage Integrator today (September 16th 2013). There are plenty of blogs/posts that go into all of the details of the new release so I will not regurgitate all of that here. But for those of you who have not seen these posts check them out at these links:

http://itzikr.wordpress.com/2013/09/10/virtual-storage-integrator-5-6-is-ga-grab-it-while-its-hot/

https://community.emc.com/community/connect/everything_vmware/blog/2013/09/16/virtual-storage-integrator-56–whats-new

UPDATE: See a full video demo by Drew Tonnesen (@drewtonnesen) here:

https://community.emc.com/videos/6222

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August 16, 2013

Expanding a Symmetrix Striped Metavolume

This is a topic that I get asked about a lot and a recent internal email thread prompted me to write a post about it. On a Symmetrix array if you want a volume larger than 240 GB you need to create a metavolume. When creating a metavolume you have two configuration choices; concatenated or striped. There are many benefits to striped over concatenated (all of them performance-related) but one disadvantage. Due to their nature striped metavolumes are harder to expand. Until a few years ago thin striped metas couldn’t even be expanded online. So the decision was easy–do you think you will need to expand or not. In Enginuity 5875 and Solutions Enabler online expansion of striped metavolumes was allowed.

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July 16, 2013

Point-in-time test recovery with VSI RecoverPoint Management and VMware SRM

Today I’ll be filling in for Cody on his blog since I couldn’t find time for one if I tried and he has been gracious enough to let me post when topics come up. My name is Drew Tonnesen (@drewtonnesen) and I’m a systems engineer in the ESD organization at EMC (basically the engineering side of the house). I work on the integration of virtualization technologies (mostly VMware) with the Symmetrix platform but also focus on VPLEX and RecoverPoint. Cody and I have worked together for many years now and though we get moved around a bit and re-organized, we both continue to work on VMware/Symmetrix integration like our TechBook (yes, shameless plug: http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/solution-overview/h2529-vmware-esx-svr-w-symmetrix-wp-ldv.pdf).

So since I mentioned I work on Symmetrix, VPLEX, and RecoverPoint I thought what better post than one on all those – and Oracle Extended RAC to boot. I’ve recently updated my white paper on this topic and it can be found here:

http://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h11767-vmware-vplex-rp-srm-wp.pdf.

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June 11, 2013

Symmetrix SRDF and VMware vCenter SRM Implementation Checklist

One of the products or maybe rather solutions that I work a lot with is integrating Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) with VMware’s vCenter Site Recovery Manager. For some shameless self-promotion (I suppose can probably drop that phrase when writing on this blog because by definition a blog is inherently self-promotion, but I digress) of the implementation guide I write it can be found here:

http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/technical-documentation/h10553-sra-vmware-5-0-tb.pdf

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