EMC Virtual Storage Integrator v5.1–released!

BANG – that’s the sound of the start gun for 2012 – and you can expect a crazy year, filled to the brim with excitement, new tech, fun, and change galore….

I’m going to do a series of blog posts highlighting some of the new stuff… Here’s the first:

Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) 5.1 is GA (and will be on powerlink on Jan 13th)

VSI is the awesome (and as always - free!) vCenter plugin for EMC customers.   It snaps right into vCenter, and exposes a ton of rich array features directly to the VMware admin.

Login to powerlink (http://powerlink.emc.com) and follow this bread-crumb trail (I’m going to try to make us start using the open communities more and more for this stuff in 2012):

In VSI 5.0 we added very rich access controls (customers who had Storage/VMware teams said the lack of robust access controls and needing to give the VMware admins full array credentials was a deal-breaker)… So… if there is a storage team – they can specifically control rights and partition the arrays such that the VMware admins have whatever delegated access they need), so how do we top that?   Ergo… what’s new in 5.1?

• Rich integration with Citrix XenDesktop!  This feature expands the rich VSI integration with VMware View to Citrix XD.  Here we leverage the fact that we can create VM-level snapshots at the array level to accelerate deployment, consume less storage, etc.   BTW – this same capability will be used in future vSphere releases as another VAAI NFS offload (“lazy NFS clone”), but you can leverage it now by using VSI (with both View and XD)
  • Simplify and create multiple desktop virtual machines
  • Register virtual machines w/ Citrix XenDesktop
  • Leverage storage efficiency to deploy desktops from a single master virtual machine
  • Store Master and Desktop virtual machines in NFS Datastore
  • Support for VNX NFS

• Rich new performance reporting!   This was one of the most requested features – and performance reporting is one of those things where a “little utility” can go a long way.  Sure, in things like Prosphere, and using Unisphere Analyzer, you can see a lot of detail, this is a quick (and handy) utiity right in vCenter where you can see vDisk, Datastore, and array stats in a single spot, and easily set up performance alerts.   Note: one important “not in there yet” is NFS performance reports – but expect to see that soon. 
  • Single pane of glass for VMware and Storage array metrics
  • •Visual warnings for VMs w/ high latency
  • •Context sensitive views for Datastore, VM and Host
  • •Support for VMFS Datastores on VMAX/VMAXe/VNX

You can see a demo of this here:

You can download this demonstration in MOV format here.

Enjoy – and feedback, as always, welcome – what more could we/should we add?

Comments

[Mario]

Will this new VSI Version also works with the "old" Clarrion models ?

Cheers,
Mario

[Sd0a]

Chad, any love for VMFS datastores on older CX4's?

[Sd0a]

Hey Chad, any love for the older CX4 line? Are they supported with VSI 5.1 with all of the bells and whistles?

[Peppe]

It would be nice to be able to change colors i then graphs . For me as color blind it's kinda hard sometimes with red and green and so on ;)

[Keith]

No love for Sd0a :-)

[JJ]

What are the prerequisites for VSI when I have a VNXe and an NX4? Navisphere CLI and Unisphere CLI? for Windows or for VMware? How do I know which ones I need?