One of the great resources we have here at EMC is our vLab environment. If you’ve attended EMC World or VMworld you no doubt have seen the hands-on-lab areas where we run many of these vLabs so our customers can learn about new products or perhaps become familiar with new features of products they already own. While at these shows we can only offer a portion of the catalog, through your EMC sales or tech representative you can have access to all our vLabs. Unfortunately the vLab portal is not directly accessible by customers but your representative can easily set you up a session and email you the link. I am going to include the detail about how to register for the vLab so that if your representative is unfamiliar with the process, you can always send them the link to this blog entry for details.
In any case all of this background to introduce a new vLab that the vLab team and I just completed: EMC Storage Analytics for VMAX3. Up until now, we only offered a vLab on ESA for the VNX platform and while it could still provide an introduction to ESA, if you have a VMAX3 (or even a VMAX) you want to see things specific to that platform. Let me run through the steps to start the vLab for those EMCers who have not done so before. To start, I found the lab very easily by selecting the “My vLab” tab and typing in “ESA” in the search box – it will automatically filter the list. Once the vLab is listed, select the “play” button to schedule the vLab.
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vLabs have great flexibility in scheduling. Not only can you reserve it for 7 days, but you can schedule it for a future time. Here is the scheduling screen.
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Have your EMC rep schedule it to suit your needs. He/She will receive an email with the link to access the vLab which they can forward to you. When you click on the link you will be directed to the lab page where you can access the lab by simply clicking on the LaunchPad as directed on the left-hand side. Before you do that, though, you’ll want to print the User Guide for the lab, or perhaps simply open it in another tab so you can follow along. The lab guide can be found under the User Guide tab, highlighted below.
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The link to the lab guide is actually another page, describing the features of the lab (which means I don’t have to here 🙂 ) and includes the PDF link for the guide itself which as I said you can print or simply have open in PDF Reader.
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So with the lab guide in hand, launch the lab. This will open a ThinRDP session which is a desktop in the browser:
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And now you are ready to start the lab. The ESA for VMAX3 lab only requires the Firefox browser. Simply follow the steps in the guide. If you do happen to take it, feel free to post your feedback in the comments. Since we release 4 ESA updates a year, I suspect I’ll be updating the lab in the future and would look to incorporate any recommendations. Thanks.
Dell PowerFlex and PowerMax with VMware 
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