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...

VMware vRO Plug-in for Dell EMC PowerMax

Today we released the VMware vRealize Orchestrator Plug-in for Dell EMC PowerMax which is available here for download. For those readers of my blog, you may recall we already have a PowerMax/VMAX plugin for vRO which I wrote about here. This original plugin is only available on GitHub and is open-source, meaning there is no...

VVol WP updates

I recently updated my Virtual Volume (VVol) whitepaper to include some answers to customer-prompted questions, along with an important discussion around VVol limitations. For those familiar with the paper I'll outline the changes here so you don't need to go searching for them. Let's start with the questions. Some of these are new, some are...

vSphere LUN and path maximums

This week I had question from our field concerning a customer and LUN/device maximums which I think is useful to share. The customer was running vSphere 6.5 which supports 512 LUNs per ESXi host (per target/array) but they were unable to see any beyond 255. Now before 6.5, I frequently heard from customers who hit...

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...

ESA 4.6 – PowerMax

So it's been less than 2 months since our last ESA release but we have another! Truth be told we had to wait to release ESA 4.5 because VMware delayed vROps 6.7 and we had already built it on that software. The new release, Dell EMC ESA 4.6, which also runs on vROps 6.7 of...

Dell EMC VMAX and PowerMax Content Pack

This week I published a new update to the VMAX Content Pack which is used in conjunction with VMware Log Insight, VMware's log collection software. You can locate it under the new name Dell EMC VMAX and PowerMax Content Pack in the VMware Solutions Exchange: or online within your own Log Insight installation: The description...

VMAX Plugin for vRO – workflows in vRA

I had promised this information in one of my previous posts on the plugin for vRO, but time got away from me and there were some more pressing things to cover. In truth, configuring vRA to execute vRO workflows is not a heavy lift. My guess is if you are familiar with vRA then you...

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...