VSI 10.6

The VSI 10.6 release continues to add to its many capabilities across the suite of Dell storage platforms. This time the focus is on PowerFlex and PowerMax, the two systems I work with most frequently. As with many of the newer features of VSI, these were added to bring parity with other storage platforms that have the capability in VSI already. I’ll cover each separately.

PowerMax

New features:

• Monitor NFS datastore capacity
• Register VASA Providers
• Details of vVol datastores

NFS

VSI can now display capacity information about NFS datastores on the PowerMax. Highlight the NFS datastore in the vSphere Client in the left-hand panel and navigate to Monitor -> Dell VSI -> Monitor Storage -> Capacity. There are two panels, Usage on the top and Historical Usage on the bottom. In the Usage panel you can modify the size of the datastore, or refresh the usage since the last update. For historical data, the user can activate the View drop-down to select 4 hours, 24 hours, or 2 week views. You can also use the hamburger menu below the View to export the data in various formats. Such capability is similar to that seen in the Aria (aka vRealize) Operations product.

vVols

VASA

VSI now offers the ability to register the VASA Provider (VP) for PowerMax when you register the array (or you can edit the array at a later time). In step 7 you’ll be offered a checkbox (which I have checked here) if you wish to register the VP. Once you check the first box, the certificate box becomes available and you must check that. Then put in a username and password. VSI will then attempt to register both VASA Providers on the array with the vCenter.

After registration, you can navigate to the array details and see if it was successful. In my example here, only one VP was registered.

A few caveats to keep in mind about this feature:

• Registration assumes you have the same user/password for both VPs. Using the same password for both VPs is against best practices. Therefore, I would only recommend registering this way in a test environment.
• Storage system registration does not provide any success/failure messages for VP registration. It will not, for instance, tell you if the user/password is incorrect and give you an opportunity to fix it. You must navigate to the detail above as I did to see if it worked.

I’m not sure how useful the feature will be for customers, but it does provide parity with other platforms.

vVol detail

The other feature around vVols is the ability to get the detail of a vVol datastore, or storage container. This is particularly useful because it provides information on the storage resources in the container along with their service level. Therefore you do not have to rely on the storage administrator to tell you what storage policies to create for vVols.

To see the detail highlight the vVol datastore in the vSphere Client in the left-hand panel and navigate to Configure -> Dell VSI -> Configure Storage -> Storage Settings. Here you will see the General, Capacity, and Storage Resources panels.

In the example below I am using SCSI (FC) presentation and my container has three storage resources.

The vVol integration for PowerMax does not include the ability to create a datastore; however, we don’t block the wizard (yes, we should be filtering), so if you attempt it, you will get to a screen where nothing is allowed. Here is a gif demonstrating the dead-end:

One final note is that there is no vVol monitoring capability. You’ll get the following message:

Let’s move to PowerFlex.

PowerFlex

NVMe/TCP

For PowerFlex we’ve added NVMe/TCP support. This falls into two categories:

• Host management
• Datastore creation/deletion (remember NVMe/TCP does not support RDMs)

Host management

Host management is similar to that offered for SDC, though there is no software to install. What VSI will do is create the NVMe host for you, rather than you doing it in the PowerFlex UI.

Navigate to the Dell VSI menu and then Storage Systems.

Drill-down into the PowerFlex system, then the Hosts tab. Select the NVMe/TCP radio button. This will display all NVMe hosts that already exist on the system, including the NVMe Connectivity. Note that this column may differ from what the PowerFlex UI reports. In my case VSI says I have 3 connections (SDT IPs), when I actually have 6 (second image), which the UI correctly reports. Unsure why the reporting is different, but always take the UI as the source of truth if there is a question.

To add a new host, click on the plus sign.

VSI will populate any ESXi hosts that are not in PowerFlex, in this example there is one. Check the box and hit ADD.

There is one limitation with this functionality. If your ESXi host has a long name like mine above, with the prefix and suffix VSI adds, it can end up exceeding 31 characters. The add will fail because you can only have 31 characters for the host name. If you hit this, you’ll have to add the host in the UI. I have asked development in the next release to allow the user to write in their own name which seems most sensible to me since that way the field can be limited to 31 characters. You can find this limitation in the Release Notes where it will include the precise character limit (18) of the ESXi host before it will hit the issue.

Adding the hosts to PowerFlex is usually the first step in adding the controllers (array) to vSphere and enabling TCP connectivity. VSI does not have the ability to add the TCP adapter in vSphere, configure the network, nor to add the controllers. That must be done by the user outside of VSI. If you are unfamiliar with the process, check my post here. Remember you don’t have to use VSI to add the NVMe hosts, that can be done with the PowerFlex UI if you wish. VSI will also let you delete the NVMe host, though it cannot have any mapped volumes, and you will still have to manually remove the controllers from the adapter for that host.

Datastore creation

The datastore creation for NVMe/TCP is really no different than the VSI datastore wizard for SCSI. Therefore it seemed easiest to just record a run-through, without voiceover. At a high-level I show:

• An ESXi host storage adapter for TCP and the controllers (all the same array, 3 paths)
• The NVMe/TCP hosts tab for the PowerFlex
• The datastore wizard
• The TCP adapter seeing the newly created and mapped device and the datastore built on it

If anything is unclear, feel free to leave a comment.

Enjoy.