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...

vSphere 6.5 U2

Last week VMware released vSphere 6.5 U2 in the midst of Dell Tech World so I didn't have a chance to post this. Normally I don't call out individual updates for vSphere, but this one contains an important fix to UNMAP that one of our customers discovered. The issue occurs only when attempting to run...

Dell EMC PowerMax

Today Dell EMC announced the latest high-end array to our family, the Dell EMC PowerMax. The PowerMax is an end-to-end NVMe solution. It's powerful and fast, period. The PowerMax is not a VMAX. It's a new platform with a new operating system, PowerMax OS. Dual-ported active/active NVMe drives (the only vendor to do so) means...

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...

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,...

VMAX TB and best practices

I've just completed the latest update to the VMAX/VMware TechBook, a tome (I can be derogatory since it's mine) of some 400 plus pages that explains how best to use VMware on the various VMAX/VMAX3/VMAX AFA arrays. You can find it here. When customers ask me about best practices, a link to this doc is...

vSphere 6.5 – UNMAP on VMAX

As I mentioned in my previous post on vSphere 6.5, VMware now offers automated UNMAP capability for VMFS datastores as well as Linux Guest OS support for UNMAP. I'll cover VMFS first, then discuss Linux support. ********************** Update 03-15-17 VMware has released vSphere 6.5 p01 which fixes a particular issue related to automated UNMAP in...

5977 2016 Q3 SR – Compression, SRDF/Metro et al

Today marks the posting of our Q3 5977 (5977.945.890) release for the VMAX3/VMAX All Flash platforms. Technically most of the host software was available last Friday (e.g. Solutions Enabler 8.3, Unisphere for VMAX 8.3) but the HYPERMAX OS was made available today. The feature that has received and will receive the most attention is compression on VMAX All...

VMAX/VMware TechBook, VAAI WP

The after-EMC World documentation updates continue with the publishing of the VMAX VMware TechBook (Using EMC VMAX Storage in VMware vSphere Environments): Click to enlarge – use browser back button to return to post and the VAAI whitepaper (Using VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration with EMC Symmetrix): Click to enlarge – use browser...