VSI 8.3

VSI 8.3 came out today and offers a number of features for the PowerMax/VMAX platform. This release essentially brings us to parity with the 7.x client for our array, and in fact a little beyond. The binary and documentation are available on the support site here. The product guide contains information on upgrading from earlier...

Documentation update

I was trying to find a way to note that I updated a doc on this site without doing a post but I gave up, hence the post. I actually updated 2 docs, the VAAI doc and the best practices TechBook. I thought I did the VAAI doc a while ago but I guess I...

Load balancing VAAI commands in PP/VE

I had a recent query concerning whether PowerPath/VE supported the load balancing of VAAI commands. Though I was fairly certain this feature was added, my memory not being what it used to be, I did some digging to confirm. Most of the VAAI commands - ATS, WRITE SAME, and UNMAP were added in PP/VE 6.1...

Update – datastore corruption issue with XCOPY

*** Update 2-27-2020 *** We have now updated the DTA for this issue where you can find the relevant patch number for the array. Please see article 000537000 for details. 537000 : DTA 537000: VMAX AFA, PowerMax: After Storage vMotion, VM Clone or any activity which invokes XCOPY in VMware ESXi 6.x, the target datastore...

PowerMax Content Pack for Log Insight v1.1

I've posted an update to the The Dell EMC VMAX And PowerMax Content Pack For VMware vRealize Log Insight which you can find on the VMware Marketplace. You can also install it directly from your implementation as below: The new version only has a couple changes. The first is a renaming of "VVol" references to...

Custom create volumes workflow in vRO PowerMax Plug-in

Our REST API is quite versatile and as you may have recently seen, we continue to take advantage of the capabilities it has via the PowerMax Plug-in; but of course it can't do everything. One of our customers recently requested the ability to create devices on the array without having to add them to a...

vRO Plug-in for Dell EMC PowerMax Version 1.2

Version 1.2 of the PowerMax vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) Plug-in is now available for download from our support site or the VMware Marketplace. For those new to vRO or the plug-in, the PowerMax Plug-in allows users to run workflows using the REST API (part of Unisphere for PowerMax) to automate both provisioning and protection, among other...

PowerMax SR – SRDF with 32Gb FC and FC-NVMe

Today Dell EMC announced the latest PowerMax Service Release (SR). Normally we have a single SR release in Q3, but this year we have two. The reason is that in our first release, which you can read about here and introduced NVMe over fabrics (FC-NVMe), we were unable to include SRDF for the 32Gb IO...

Tech Preview of SRM with vVols on PowerMax

Disclaimer: This post concerns pre-GA releases from both VMware and Dell EMC. This overview of new technology represents no commitment from VMware or Dell EMC to deliver these features in any generally available product. Today at VMworld Europe, VMware and Dell EMC introduced a preview of VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) with VMware Virtual Volumes...