Dell Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager and PowerFlex

The Dell Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager is a validated solution by Dell that permits database administrators to monitor Dell servers in an Oracle environment AND can provide storage information for any of those databases residing on PowerFlex storage (and only PowerFlex). The support matrix is simple enough so I'll supply it here: Dell PowerEdge...

VMFS to NVMeoF offline migration

We've been working with VMware for many months on a process to do offline migration from VMFS datastores to NVMeoF without incurring the penalty of moving all the data as is required with online migration - whether SvMotion or PPME. While the process itself is not complex, many ancillary concerns needed addressing such as checking...

vSphere 8.0 U1

Most vSphere updates are not significant enough for a blog post, but VMware has been treating updates as an opportunity to add features which normally you might only see in a major release. This is part of their ongoing strategy. And so it is with 8.0 U1 (8.0.1) which has a lot of updates for...

Dell SRDF SRA 10.0.1 and Targetless Gold Copies

As part of the PowerMaxOS 10 SR released today, we have a new SRDF SRA which has a feature I've been requesting for, well, years: targetless gold copies on failover (planned or disaster recovery). The new capability will enable customers to avoid creating extra devices when they are in need of a pristine copy of...

PowerMaxOS 10 Service Release

We've dropped our latest service release (SR) for PowerMaxOS 10 (6079) which covers the PowerMax platforms 2500 and 8500. You can find all the documentation here. Service releases are generally focused on bug fixes and performance enhancements, and this release is no exception, but sometimes they include features which did not make it into the...

VSI 10.2

A rather minor release for VSI, 10.2 does not have any new features, but it does fix an issue with PowerMax best practices. NVMeoF BPs We recently introduced the ability to set path management for NVMeoF devices. This management is similar to that for traditional SCSI devices in that there is a LUN setting and...

SRDF SRA Upgrade

Our SRDF SRA version 10 has been out for some time now which means more customers are beginning to think about upgrading their 9.2 environment. Version 10 supports all the configurations that 9.2 does (you can compare release notes), along with more recent releases of both PowerMax and SRM. This is enabled by the backward...

Veeam PowerMax Plug-in Update

Let me start by getting the obvious question out of the way. No, the update is not about REST 10 support. This is a patch for the current plug-in to enhance functionality with REST 9. I highly recommend it, however, so please read on if you use the plug-in. PowerMax Plug-in Version 1.0.90 Veeam posted...

PowerFlex SRA whitepaper

I finally finished the new whitepaper for using the PowerFlex SRA with VMware SRM. The paper covers PowerFlex 3.x and 4.x using asynchronous replication (the only kind we support). For anyone who has had the unpleasant experience of using my 400 page SRDF SRA tome for PowerMax, you'll be happy to know this paper is...

VMware Cloud Foundation & Storage Support

VMware Cloud Foundation, or VCF, has been coming up in conversations with customers more frequently these days, mostly in the PowerFlex space. And while I did an extensive post on it previously with PowerMax, it has been some three years and at that time I did not discuss PowerFlex (or ScaleIO as it was then...