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...

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...

Thick or thin VMDKs on VMAX/PowerMax

Thick or thin? This is a question I get in almost all best practice discussions with customers and while I cover it in the TechBook and elsewhere, I thought I'd do a quick post on it without all the extras. VMware offers 2 types of disks - thick or thin - and 3 disk types - thin, zeroedthick,...

VSI 7.3

Happy New Year everyone. It's been a bit since I've posted but we do have a new VSI release to talk about. This one comes late as we do normally release quarterly, but seeing as it wasn't expected at all, I suppose a month late isn't bad. So last time I wrote about VSI, I mentioned 7.2 was most...

3-site SRDF with VMware SRM

As there is a 500 page TechBook on SRDF with SRM, it might seem a bit redundant to be covering a topic like this again, and perhaps it is; but as I have worked with customers and support over many months (and years), a few issues seem to recur. It's usually at that point I figure...

Stranded space on VMAX All Flash datastores – can I get it back?

In a word, yes. Let me start with a basic explanation of VMware storage versus array storage. A VMAX All Flash (AFA) array is a completely thin-provisioned box. A hallmark of using a thin array with VMware invariably means what VMware reports as used storage in a datastore may not reflect what an array reports...

SRDF SRA – Python script for masking functionality

Back in March we offered customers a way to generate the EmcSrdfSraTestFailoverConfig.xml file for the SRDF SRA test failover functionality when using the vCenter Appliance (VCSA). You can read all about that here. Recently we had a customer request to enhance the script to add the ability to create the EmcSrdfSraDeviceMaskingControl.xml file and our developer Sam went...

Down Protection Site: VMware SRM TestFailover with the SRDF SRA

One of the great features of VMware SRM is the ability to run a test failover without impacting either the protection or recovery site. When using the SRDF SRA this means the replication between the R1 and the R2, whether asynchronous or synchronous, will not be broken. The SRA uses TimeFinder technology to accomplish this,...