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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

vSphere 6.5 U1, SRDF/Metro

VMware just released Update 1 for vSphere 6.5 (ESXi, vCenter). You can search for it on the VMware website. Now normally I don't bother putting up posts about updates or patches. The way VMware certification is passed is at the base release (e.g. 6.5) so if they release an update or patch it is supported...

VSI 7.2 – vSphere 6.5 support

VSI 7.2 is available today for download here. This is quite a minor release, though not unimportant because it adds support for vSphere 6.5. Now you might say, wait I thought you introduced vSphere 6.5 support In VSI 7.1. Yeah, well we did kind of, but it was only support for the 6.5 Web Client...