As Tom says, PowerMaxOS 10.1.0.0 brings the goodies. We have a number of features in this release in the VMware space. At a high-level the major additions in categories:
Hardware
- Support for NVMe/FC on the PowerMax 2500/8500 – we did not offer it when we released this platform, but added it back upon request.
- New iPDU for monitoring power and environment
- New data reduction hardware – efficiency
- AIOps – everything is AI right? Specifically the engine provides effective capacity predictions and provides remediations before things go bad – essentially this intelligence prevents you from running out of space.
Unisphere
- REST API additions – things like support for bulking of storage configurations. Paul Martin is the man for this stuff so check his blog if this is of interest: Raw Storage
- Major changes to VMware integration in Unisphere for PowerMax – more detail (e.g., columns), added functionality like RDM provisioning.
- Non-Disruptive Migration (NDM) for SRDF/Metro – this is more of a software feature in general, but since you can do NDM in Unisphere made sense to put it here.
vVols
- Support for vVols NVMe/TCP – essentially this means a new type of protocol endpoint which is virtual, along with a new storage container type. All other functionality is also supported, e.g., VMware SRM. Just to be clear, there is no vVol support for FC/NVMe.
- Add/remove VASA GuestOS
- VASA TLS 1.3 support
SRDF SRA
- Support for SRDF/Metro Smart DR (MetroDR) with the SRDF SRA
XCOPY – SvMotion
- This one you won’t see in the docs so you’ll have to take my word on it. We’ve changed the way that IO is processed during an XCOPY SvMotion operation such that the user will not experience the hit in latency that could be experienced. No, sorry we have not changed XCOPY itself, nor has VMware increased the extent size above 64 MB, but surely negating the penalty to the user during the SvMotion run is welcome.
Detail
As has been my practice for big array code releases, I wrote a number of blog posts on the important features for VMware. I’ve listed them below so you can find what is of interest. I also made an attempt to update as many of my published docs as time permitted. Being in the PowerFlex group, I was unable to spend as much time as I needed on PowerMax. Therefore I focused on the how-to blogs since in my opinion that is more crucial. Over the next few weeks I’ll get to the docs I missed.
Dell PowerFlex and PowerMax: VMware and Virtualization 