Dell EMC VMAX and PowerMax CP 1.3/Log Insight 8.6

VMware recently released the vRealize Suite 8.6 which includes Log Insight version 8.6. You may have noticed they skipped Log Insight 8.5, though it is not the only vRealize product that did not have a version 8.5. My guess is VMware wanted to re-align all vRealize versions so they simply skipped 8.5 for some products....

PiTs with SRM and the SRDF SRA

I wanted to revisit this post on using point-in-time (PiTs) with SRM and the SRDF SRA having just demonstrated SRM with virtual and physical infrastructure. A dual purpose environment was the original impetus for adding the parameter IgnoreActivatedSnapshots so many years ago now, and as it has been four years since the post I thought...

Combine physical and virtual infrastructure with SRM

Although less common than it used to be, some of our customers still have their physical and virtual environments tightly bound together. For the sake of argument (and my example), let's say the database runs on a Solaris or AIX box, but the applications accessing that database are on VMware. Such configurations typically run a...

The Dell EMC PowerMax Veeam Plug-in

Today the Dell EMC PowerMax Veeam Plug-in for Veeam Backup & Replication went GA and is available for download from their website here under the Storage Plug-ins tab.  The plug-in has been a high priority ask from our customers for a while because taking advantage of our local replication technology provides the same type of...

Oracle RAC vVol test failover without SRM (import snapshot)

Our vVol 2.0/VASA 3.0 implementation which includes SRDF replication, is best implemented with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). We do not recommend using PowerCLI as there are manual processes involved and there are known issues. There's really little comparison between the two. SRM handles all the orchestration for you and is the superior solution for...

vVols, Oracle RAC, and VMware SRM

Recently I've been working on a project covering Oracle RAC running on vVols. We have more customers taking a good look at vVols, particularly now as we offer both HA (embedded VASA containers) and replication, and Oracle comes up frequently as an application they might want to run. It's fair to say we also see...

ESA 6.2

Dell EMC Enterprise Storage Analytics, the plugin to vRealize Operations, is now out with version 6.2. I haven't posted on ESA since 6.0 because 6.1 did not make any changes for PowerMax. This release, however, has a couple new features. The major features are: FC-NVMe tolerance vVol replication support (vROps 8.4 support - OK this...

Oracle RAC on VMFS – SnapVX restore for testing

I've had some questions from customers running Oracle RAC on VMFS who would like to use TimeFinder/SnapVX to test, rather than Oracle tools like RMAN. This is a sensible course given that for large databases RMAN takes a long time to restore, and SnapVX is basically instantaneous. But why use either solution when I can...

vCenter 6.5 – 7.0 critical security issue

I normally don't cover the various security patches that VMware releases for different vCenter versions, but this one rises to the level of code red (9.8 out of 10). Some outside groups discovered that if they had access to port 443 on the vCenter, they could get unrestricted access to the underlying operating system. This...

PowerMax Data Reduction & VMware

Before I discuss data reduction on the PowerMax, I will acknowledge that this can be a confusing topic or process in general. A couple of our field guys, Dan McKenney and Ken Gotsch, get frequent questions in the field as they work with data reduction all the time in VMware, so I offered to write...