VSI 7.3.3 with vSphere 6.7 support

Only 3 days ago I wrote about VMware's new vSphere 6.7 release and cautioned that the current VSI release did not support it but a release was on the way...and today it has arrived. VSI 7.3.3. is now available for download. Just a couple things to know about this release. First, the release will supplant...

vSphere 6.7 & SRM 8.1

Today VMware has posted the newest release of their flagship vSphere product, 6.7. In addition they have also dropped Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 8.1. A new vSphere release always means lots of new features, and I'd be a fool to try to enumerate them seeing as there is a document for that. I'll mention a...

vSphere 6.7 automated UNMAP enhancements

Continuing from vSphere 6.7 post... So in vSphere 6.5 VMware introduced automated UNMAP for datastores. In so doing they offered users two option: on (default) or off. Rather than a checkbox, however, VMware has what appears to be a scale which would allow the user to decide how aggressive UNMAP should be. It didn't work...

VMAX Plugin for vRO Workflow Modification

Some of you may be very familiar with vRealize Orchestrator and how to go about customizing these workflows that are part of the VMAX Plugin. For those who are not, I thought I would show you how to make a change to an existing attribute of a workflow to enable another option. I'm going to...

Dell EMC ESA 4.5

Dell EMC ESA 4.5 is now available for download here. The first thing you'll notice is there has been a name change. Although Dell bought EMC years ago at this point, name changes can take time as there are all sorts of legal hoops to jump through as well as individual country requirements. The good...

VMAX Plugin for vRO Walkthroughs

I put together a few videos for the VMAX Plugin. The first one here steps through installing the plugin in the vRealize Orchestrator Control Center. Be sure the service for this is started before attempting since by default it is disabled. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mPcLJrsIXM The second video demonstrates how to add a new vCenter to vRO and...

VMAX Plugin for vRealize Orchestrator

Many of the developers I work with daily on the VMware integrations have been hard at work on a project for a few months now. I'm happy to report that after internal testing it's finally ready for public consumption - the VMAX Plugin for vRealize Orchestrator (vRO). The plugin delivers workflows, actions, and even the APIs to...

ALUA and Mobility ID on VMAX

A recent interaction with a customer led to this blog post concerning the Mobility ID that we support for VMAX devices and the multipathing policy of ALUA (Asymmetrical Logical Unit Access). Mobility devices are the only ones that support ALUA on the VMAX. ALUA multipathing is typically associated with non-VMAX arrays like the former Clariion...