VMAX/VMware TechBook terminal release

I've posted what is the terminal release of the TechBook Using Dell EMC VMAX and PowerMax in VMware vSphere Environments. For those not familiar with it, this book contains the general best practices of using VMware with the VMAX/PowerMax family of arrays. This latest update has, for the most part, minor changes, and will cover...

SRDF SRA TechBook 9.1

I published the latest SRDF SRA TechBook version 9.1 today. You can get it here. A reminder that this TechBook only covers SRA 9.x. Prior SRA versions are in the original TB which is located in the documentation library. Besides the changes for 9.1, I added some sections which I have covered in this blog...

TechBook update for PowerMax

Well PowerMax has been out for a few months now but I only just finished my VMAX/PowerMax/VMware TechBook update here. It's always a bear to be perfectly honest since it encompasses all best practices but the blog can only buy me so much time before we need it in official form. I've managed to get...

Dell EMC SRDF SRA 9.0, PowerMax and SRM 8.1

Today we posted the latest SRDF SRA 9.0 which is released in conjunction with our new PowerMax OS and Solutions Enabler 9.0. You can download both the Release Notes and software here. The most frequent question I have had as of late is what SRA supports the new SRM 8.1. It's this one. With that...

VSI 7.3.3 with vSphere 6.7 support

Only 3 days ago I wrote about VMware's new vSphere 6.7 release and cautioned that the current VSI release did not support it but a release was on the way...and today it has arrived. VSI 7.3.3. is now available for download. Just a couple things to know about this release. First, the release will supplant...

vSphere 6.7 & SRM 8.1

Today VMware has posted the newest release of their flagship vSphere product, 6.7. In addition they have also dropped Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 8.1. A new vSphere release always means lots of new features, and I'd be a fool to try to enumerate them seeing as there is a document for that. I'll mention a...

vSphere 6.7 automated UNMAP enhancements

Continuing from vSphere 6.7 post... So in vSphere 6.5 VMware introduced automated UNMAP for datastores. In so doing they offered users two option: on (default) or off. Rather than a checkbox, however, VMware has what appears to be a scale which would allow the user to decide how aggressive UNMAP should be. It didn't work...

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...

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...