PowerMax Data Reduction & VMware

Before I discuss data reduction on the PowerMax, I will acknowledge that this can be a confusing topic or process in general. A couple of our field guys, Dan McKenney and Ken Gotsch, get frequent questions in the field as they work with data reduction all the time in VMware, so I offered to write...

VMUG webcast

My colleague Tom O'Neill and I recently did a webast for the VM Users Group on PowerMax and vVols. You can find the recording below. I also included a link to the demo in the webcast which I have separately uploaded to my YouTube channel. Webcast https://youtu.be/rmLWKHNsQ08 Demo https://youtu.be/7Zmw9xne0zE

VMware Clustered VMDK, SCSI3-PR and WEAR

Just a short (for me anyway) post here on a vSphere 7 feature I get pinged about every so often: Clustered VMDK. VMware introduced this feature in vSphere 7. It is an attribute of a VMFS6 datastore which can be enabled on a new datastore  - post-creation as the option is not available in the...

vSphere 7.0 U2 – iSCSI, vVols

VMware recently released Update 2 for vSphere 7, both ESXi and the vCenter. I'm going to cover a few of the new additions in this release, though not all, so I have put in the links to the READMEs. VMware updates used to be minor events, but more and more they are packing these with...

SRM 8.4 and the SRDF SRA

VMware recently released a bunch of new software versions for various products including vSphere and SRM. I'm going to cover the updates to vSphere in a different post soon, so this one is only for SRM. The new 8.4 release doesn't have a lot of features in it (mostly UI changes), but it is required...

Multiple SRDF/A groups and the SRDF SRA with SRM

Yes, another SRM post. I guess I do write a lot of them to be fair. I'm not actively seeking them out I assure you. As is the case the vast majority of the time, this is drawn from a customer experience. I had not given much thought to the differences in these scenarios I...

CSI Driver for PowerMax & VM in-Guest iSCSI

Last year I did a post on VMware's Cloud Native Storage and how you could use their CSI (container storage interface) driver to provision to Kubernetes running in VMware via VMFS, NFS, and vVols, and all on the PowerMax. The direct integration makes this ideal. I used a vanilla K8s implementation, though vSphere has other...

PowerMax 2021 Q1 Service Release

This is our Service Release for the GA PowerMaxOS that came out in September 2020. This is our standard practice after a major release so that we can both fix any issues that may have come up (though I should note we do have a recent service pack, too) and to include some new features...

Dell EMC VMAX and PowerMax Content Pack 1.2

I've updated the Dell EMC VMAX and PowerMax Content Pack for VMware Log Insight on the VMware Marketplace. The new version is 1.2. It does take a day or two for the new version to show up within your own Log Insight Marketplace instance, so if you would like the latest version now you'll have...

VSI 8.6 – PowerMax snapshot policies and hosts

VSI 8.6 is available for download today. This version does away with the previous process for registering the vCenter as part of the OVA deployment. Instead it provides a new interface which I'll cover below. Along with registration updates, there are a number of new features for PowerMax. At a high-level these are the new...