VSI 10.5

VSI 10.5 is available today and has a few features for PowerMax, though none for PowerFlex this time around. Let’s do a quick run-through.

Upgrade

No new feature here just a PSA. There are multiple ways to upgrade VSI. The easiest way is to use the UI, but you can push a compressed tar and install via script.

PowerMax new features

These are the new features, really just two:

• Restore a VMFS snapshot
  • Terminate a VMFS snapshot restore session
• Monitor datastore performance

VMFS restore/terminate snapshots

The user is now able to take an existing VMFS datastore snapshot and restore it back in-place. The location to execute the restore can be confusing because I think most people start by using the VSI menu. So if you highlight a datastore and then use the VSI menu you will see the following:

Seems to make sense right? Um, no.

That particular menu is not for PowerMax. Yes confusing. So instead, highlight the datastore and on the right-hand panel navigate to Configure -> Dell VSI -> Configure Storage. Once there, click the checkbox on the desired snapshot and use the drop-down More Actions -> Restore.

You’ll get a warning which is important as it tells you how to *try* to avoid corruption:

*****************    Timeout    *******************************

I feel it necessary to stop here and point out that our PowerMax/VMware documented best practices for refreshing (restoring) a datastore call for shutting down VMs, unregistering them, and unmounting the datastore, then restoring, and reversing the process. The warning above wants the user to halt applications, flush cache, etc. to avoid corruption. The documented best practices avoids this corruption by following the steps I just outlined. I don’t develop or code VSI and I was not involved in the feature. I still recommend you follow the best practices if VMs are involved. If you are refreshing a datastore with isos or the like, I’m less concerned, or even a test/dev you don’t care about. For production, I’d personally never do this. OK back to the feature.

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The restore is quick, being SnapVX. You just need to run a refresh of the datastore to see the altered contents.

After restoring, you can then terminate the restore session. This leaves you with the restored data.

Remember you can’t rewind. If you want to be safe, take a snapshot of the datastore prior to the restore. This way you have a way to go back. Again, I don’t recommend this procedure generally, but it is available.

Monitoring

The other feature they added is monitoring for the PowerMax datastores. This has been available for other platforms so it’s a catch-up. There are three graphs: Latency, IOPS, and Throughput. To see them, highlight the datastore on the left, and navigate to Monitor -> Dell VSI -> Monitor Storage. You’ll see the graphs. There are checkboxes for each graph so you can show all, some, or none. The performance is all host IO to the datastore/device from the array metrics perspective. I put all the images together, but you’d have a scroll bar in vCenter on the right.

As promised, quick post.