ESA 4.2 dropped today with a bunch of new features across many platforms. Here is the complete list from the Release Notes.
You’ll notice there’s not much on the VMAX front this time around which, given our abundance of supported platforms that must be coded, is no surprise. We all have our turn at the wheel. Lucky for you a quick post 🙂 So the one thing you’ll see we did in 4.2 is to expand VVol functionality, namely capacity planning. This will allow customers to estimate their future space usage in both VVol Storage Resources and VVol Storage Containers, just like you can do today with devices. Recall in ESA 4.1 we released VVol support which included both topology and metrics, along with dashboard additions.
The two sub-tabs which are most pertinent to capacity planning are under the Analysis tab when viewing the details of a particular object: Capacity Remaining and Time Remaining. There are many ways to drill into the details of an object. In my screenshot here I navigated to Environment -> Inventory Trees > EMC Storage Topologies > VMAX All Flash Array > VVol Storage Container.
Here are those two views for my VVol storage container. Capacity Remaining will provide an estimate of average demand, peak value, and of course remaining storage. Time Remaining will extrapolate and show how long until you run out of space, given historical usage.
I think for customers this is a fairly useful feature, though it may not be apparent in my pics since my lab is so volatile and I have so little data. The real view comes after at least 30 days of data collection which will give you a good idea where your storage usage is going.
I wanted to mention one other minor thing related to capacity planning/metrics that we did in ESA 4.1 but that I failed to talk about in my last post. Because ESA is using the framework of vROps, our metrics sometimes are intertwined with VMware’s. Sometimes this is OK, but other times it can get really confusing, particularly with capacity metrics. Before ESA 4.1, for instance, it was impossible to tell by sight which capacity metrics were VMware’s and which were ours. In one case using the Product Guide wasn’t even helpful since the VMware and ESA metric had the same name (e.g. Total Capacity (GB)). Therefore we decided to prefix ours with “EMC” so there is no more guess-work.
We do have a few resources that are not yet following this format – VVols come to mind. That should be fixed in the next release.
There are also a couple support items I want to make you aware of in this 4.2 release.
- ESA 4.2 can only be installed in a vROps 6.4 or 6.2.1 environment, 6.3 is not supported.
- ESA 4.2 supports both HYPERMAX OS 5977.813.785 and 5977.945.890. This aligns with our practice of supporting the most recent GA and the previous one (N-1).
ESA 4.2 can be found here for download:
ESA 4.2 Software and Documentation
Dell PowerFlex and PowerMax with VMware 
Leave a Reply