vCLS and Virtual Volumes

vCLS vCLS or vSphere Cluster Services was introduced in vSphere 7.0 U1 as a way to manage vSphere DRS and vSphere HA with the intended goal, as far as I understand it, to allow these services to eventually run without the vCenter (not yet). vCLS is represented by eponymous VMs, with 1-3 per vSphere cluster....

PowerFlex, CSIs and VMware CNS with vVols

In this post I'll cover both the vSphere CSI and the PowerFlex CSI. Since both are utilized in a VMware environment, let's start there. vSphere and Kubernetes VMware has made Kubernetes or K8s, an integral part of their vSphere solution. Whether as part of vSphere in the form of Tanzu (with or without VCF), or...

VDI – vVol Linked Clones

Many enterprise customers use at least part of their infrastructure to host VDI environments or virtual desktops. Even at Dell I can order up one of these desktops through a self-service catalog if the need arises. I've seen a variety of different types of VDI implementations from NFS to FC, sometimes on a small dedicated...

vSphere 8

*** Nov 8, 2022 update *** VMware has declared this IA release as GA now. You don't have to change anything it magically becomes GA. ************************* A new major vSphere release is available for download today - vSphere 8. VMware previously announced this at VMware Explore in August, but now you can actually get the...

VASA Provider certificates

This one is not in my wheelhouse by a long shot, but having recently assisted our sales team with one of their customers, it is clear our documentation on certificates with the VASA Provider (VP) is lacking. My intent is to present the options available to the user with the VP certs. I'm not going...

vVols, Oracle RAC, and VMware SRM

Recently I've been working on a project covering Oracle RAC running on vVols. We have more customers taking a good look at vVols, particularly now as we offer both HA (embedded VASA containers) and replication, and Oracle comes up frequently as an application they might want to run. It's fair to say we also see...

ESA 6.2

Dell EMC Enterprise Storage Analytics, the plugin to vRealize Operations, is now out with version 6.2. I haven't posted on ESA since 6.0 because 6.1 did not make any changes for PowerMax. This release, however, has a couple new features. The major features are: FC-NVMe tolerance vVol replication support (vROps 8.4 support - OK this...

PowerMax 2021 Q1 Service Release

This is our Service Release for the GA PowerMaxOS that came out in September 2020. This is our standard practice after a major release so that we can both fix any issues that may have come up (though I should note we do have a recent service pack, too) and to include some new features...

vVols – FC and iSCSI together

Let’s continue our previous discussion around iSCSI by looking at accessing vVols with FC and iSCSI in the same datacenter. Beginning with the Embedded Dell EMC VASA Provider version 3.0 (aka eVASA), we support the use of iSCSI with the Protocol Endpoint. (Note it is only the eVASA version that supports iSCSI. You can’t use...

PowerMaxOS 5978 Q3 2020 release

Today we officially launched the latest PowerMaxOS (5978.669.669) which, along with accompanying software releases, offers some new VMware capabilities that have been in high demand from our customers. Most notably, these include support for replication with VMware Virtual Volumes (vVol) - vVols 2.0/VASA 3.0 support - and support for the SRM Appliance with our SRDF...