EMC Celerra VSA UBERv3 (DART 6.0) now available!!!

EMC Unified Engineering and vSpecialists Nick Weaver have done it again!  

The new Celerra VSA is immediately available.  Like always, it is functionally equivalent to a EMC Celerra of the same DART rev, it never times out, and you can add as much storage to it as you want.  

This is the easiest a way for anyone to get real hands on on the fastest growing commercial unified (NAS+Block) platform out there, and build the baseline of a “homebrew” vSphere environment with something that matches a real production environment.  

Like always – there is best-effort support (http://forums.emc.com and www.emc.com/vmwarecommunity ), and it is not supported in production environments.

It’s a huge release, and there’s been further automation and simplification.

Again, thanks to the EMC Engineering teams and Nick Weaver.   As always, I continue to push for more EMC tech to be made public in virtual appliance format.

Read on for download links, and for what’s new.

I quote the “what’s new” from Nick’s post:

• DART is now 6.0.36.4
• Unisphere management console (rocks!)
• With DART 6.0 the Celerra became 64-bit (still has some 32-bit filesystem max limits, but those will also disappear soon), so of course, the Celerra VSA is also now 64 bit! This means you can throw RAM at it for bigger setups and it will use it. Over 8GB becomes less beneficial without code changes to simulation services. Future updates will fix this from the Celerra VSA engineering teams.
• The biggest and most difficult change to construct; is that the configuration is now adaptive depending on the virtual machine setup. This version is now intelligent in seeing how many resources you have given it.
  The new Celerra UBER VSA uses this intelligence to now allow *Thin* mode. If you give the VSA under 2GB of RAM it will automatically size the memory limits, processes, and management interface settings to allow it to run with as long as 1024MB of RAM. You won’t do replication or host a ton of VM’s but you can use this mode to host a few and fully demonstrate/test the new Unisphere interface on even a 2GB laptop.
• The new VSA also uses this intelligence to automatically allow the configuration of single or dual Data Mover version based on the memory assigned. If you give the VSA more than 4GB of memory you will be given the option to enable an additional Data Mover for use as a standby or load balancing experimentation. This means this single appliance can be a small lightweight NFS unit at 1024MB of RAM or can be a 2 Data Mover powerhouse at 8GB of RAM. All automatically configured on first boot through the wizard.
  Automatic VMDK/Storage additions have been adjusted for new 64 bit OS. This means this still works. Shutoff the VM, add VMDK(s), turn on and you have more space. Automagic
• Since automagic is so cool, I have changed the Data Mover Ethernet binding to be automatic also. The VM starts with 1 interface for management and 1 interface for the Data Movers. If you want more for the DM(s), just shutoff the VM, add NIC cards (up to 6 additional), and turn back on. It will automatically bind the Data Mover (yes it works with the 2 DM mode also) to the new interfaces and virtual slots. Just go back into Unisphere and assign away. This allows scale up for the bigger 2 Data Mover 8GB of RAM versions easily.
  Configuration is now Perl/Bash based instead of just Bash to keep things cleaner and slicker and allow for some coolness later on
  NTP from the configuration portion of the wizard works correctly. It sets both the Control Station and all Data Movers and enables NTP as a running service. Make sure your NTP server is valid.

Couple things to note:

Adding an extra Data Mover can extend the setup time up to 5-10 minutes depending on your hardware. I will speed this up in the future but for now this is a one-time penalty for being Data Mover greedy. Also remember to give it the extra RAM/vCPU before turning it on the first time.

You cannot change the number of Data Movers without redeploying a new version. Once it is born with two heads it stays that way. Same thing with the Thin mode. Once it is deployed Thin, adding more RAM will not refactor the VSA.

Thin mode (<2GB of RAM) will still incur some mild swapping the closer to 1024MB you get. If you have a laptop with an SSD putting the first drive on it will almost completely negate any noticeable slowdown with mild loads.

From now on Eth0 is the management interface. This corresponds to NIC1 in your VM. Every other interface after is for the Data Movers and will start at CGE0 and increment. So NIC2 is Eth1 is CGE0 (per DM) inside Unisphere and NIC3 is Eth3 is CGE1 inside Unisphere. Pretty easy…

Now that this is 64 bit you can no longer run it inside a virtual ESX(i) inside Workstation 7. It has to be run directly on ESX(i) or Workstation 7.

Rememeber: Like always – there is best-effort support (http://forums.emc.com and www.emc.com/vmwarecommunity ), and it is not supported in production environments.

Now get to downloading…

PLEASE HEAD TO NICK’S SITE TO DOWNLOAD 

Have fun!!!

Comments

[Mark Burgess]

Hi Chad,

Does this include FLARE so that you can provision iSCSI native block or is only DART?

Many thanks
Mark

[Nicholas Weaver]

Mark,

It is only DART 6.0. There is a Flare VSA which will be out sometime in the future. You can still provision iSCSI with the Celerra VSA using the DART 6.0 iSCSI.

.nick

[Nas Admin]

All I have to say is THANK YOU Nick! I have been waiting for this since EMC World, much appreciated.

[Tom Miller]

Chad,
Your team ROCKS!! I've been trying for awhile to get the VSA to work with vSphere and SRM. Does this new VSA work with vSphere 4.1 and SRM 4.1. I've had issues with the network config running consistent.

Thanks for your hard work. Love the guys shirts at VMworld. Awesome.

[Chad Sakac]

@Tom - THANKS! They work hard have a lot of fun, I'm very proud of the whole team.

re the VSA and SRM 4.1 - YES. In fact, as of yesterday, Nick has posted an end-to-end video guide...

http://nickapedia.com/2010/10/07/lights-camera-replication-uber-srm-video-guide/

[Rawley Burbridge]

Hey Chad unrelated question but this was the top hit for your website + "Datamover".

On one recent KB (http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1023759)
there was an issue fixed that I had ran into in the past, storage vmotion stops responding at 18% due to not enough contiguous memory for the DataMover thread and it fails back to Application Layer movement.

Is there a location or way to read more about these types of low level operations? I'm inquisitive and would like to know more about topics such as this but haven't been able to find a good method to do so. I am curious about these specific topics but would also like to know in general for future "in depth" areas that may come up.