Fun with completely not supported, pre-alpha EMC tools: Part 1

[UPDATE: Sept 23rd, 9:16 – fixed community links]

One of the things that makes me most happy about my job is meetings, planning, and budgeting… NOT.

In all seriousness – those are necessary evils.  What DOES make me happy is working with my team, my fellow EMCers and EMC partners, with customers and with engineering.   I’m really lucky to get exposed to a lot of ideas, a lot of technologies, and am surrounded by a lot of people who are constantly coming up with cool – and frankly FUN – ideas.

This is the first of a 3 part series on this topic.  Each one will “out” a killer tool.   Each of them will grow over time.  Each of them is free.  For now, all of them are not supported (and in one case not even in circulation).

I will be providing a pile of “Santa Chad” awards to people who innovate on top of the two of these ideas.  Think iPads, Iomega PX4s, and VNXe 3300s.    Remember, it COULD be throwaway work – since they are not supported products per se.   But those of you that know me – there’s always methods to my madness :-)

The first one: “Hyperic/vCenter Operations/EMC VNX NFS Uber Mashup” 

This was a bit of “out of the box” thinking by vSpecialist Clint Kitson in the run-up to VMworld 2011.   He wanted to solve the problem of having simple and immediate visibility into the VNX NFS performance data – and do it in a cool way, a way that would nicely integrate with how the VMware HoL folks were using to monitor the whole operation – vCenter Operations.

Read on to see how this works, and where you can use it yourself….

For those of you that haven’t seen this before – it’s REALLY cool.    The instrumentation was super-handy during the VMworld HoL.    Check these out…

And, yes, for those of you who followed the VMworld HoL brouhaha on The Register – there are other youtube videos (not public) that show exactly the load, and latencies on all the platforms in the HoL.   Suffice it that I’m very confident in EMC part of supporting the VMware HoL.

So – do you want this for yourself?    It’s EASY!   This will work with the Celerra or VNX NFS VSAs from EMC if you want to play and learn, or will work with physical EMC Celerra and VNX platforms.

Clint has been kind enough to post a HOWTO to the “Everything VMware @ EMC" community – which is always here (and WIDE OPEN to the public).   Click on the doc below to go right to the doc and the code itself.  HAVE FUN!

BTW – if VMware isn’t your thing, there is a burgeoning “Everything Microsoft @ EMC” community here, an “Everything SAP @ EMC” community here, and an “Everything Oracle @ EMC” community here.

Each of them are THE place to go if you’re a customer, EMC partner, EMCer, or Microsoft, VMware, SAP, Oracle employee to ask questions from the people at EMC that focus on those particular topics.

What could the next two cool tools be???    Stay tuned for tomorrow!!!

Comments

[James]

Would really like to see this concept for VNX/Clariion block, not just NFS. Do you know if there's anybody working down that path?