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...

Dell EMC ESA 4.5

Dell EMC ESA 4.5 is now available for download here. The first thing you'll notice is there has been a name change. Although Dell bought EMC years ago at this point, name changes can take time as there are all sorts of legal hoops to jump through as well as individual country requirements. The good...

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...

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,...

ESA 4.3 – vROps 6.6, new VMAX metrics

EMC Storage Analytics 4.3 is now available for download. You can find the documentation and binary here. Probably the most important aspect of this release, putting my bias aside, is that it supports vRealize Operations version 6.6. Before I talk about that, here is the full list of changes, courtesy of an RN screenshot. If...

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...

VMware-VMAX integration

This week at Dell EMC World I presented a session on the ways the VMAX platform integrates into VMware software. Essentially this is my job, figuring out where we can integrate and then whether we should integrate - and of course all that follows - researching, testing, documenting, etc. We already have lots of integration points...