HOWTO: Download, Install and License EMC PowerPath/VE

Sometimes in my gig I don’t follow the same process as everyone else.   Sometimes that’s useful, but often – it bothers me. 

If something is hard, I want to see/feel/experience the “hardness” of it and work to fix it.  If something is easy, I want to see that it’s easy and talk about how easy it is.  It’s the only way for me to really say one way or the other.

My deep, dark fear – you know, the one that makes one wake up in cold sweats - is that I become someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about :-)

So – without further ado, I dove into the “official” (i.e. just figure it out solo) way to to get PowerPath/VE – for EVERYONE, including licensing and installation.

And, I found it was EASY, and I was up and running in less than 24 hrs.

Here it is – 8 simple minutes, including how to install and license (including getting demo and eval licenses if you’re EMC, VMware, an EMC partner, customer, or heck anyone).

Download the high-rez version here.

I’ve now got it humming against my CX4 (with and without ALUA), and will be testing against a FAS6030 over the next couple of days.  That’s not officially supported, but I think I might be able to force the claim policy.  With all the back and forth, will be interesting to see the results – one way or another!   I’ve already been learning more about ALUA in config and in operation.   Good, good stuff, and I can put that fear of mine back in the closet for a little bit :-)

While EMC were first to enhance the storage stack via the Pluggable Storage Architecture (and along with the Nexus 1000v Ethernet module the first 3rd party vmkernel modules for vSphere), it looks like there are others now coming with 3rd party modules, along with the first wave of VMSafe elements.   I believe that Dell/EqualLogic has made a third party PSP (or at least announced it).  While I believe it’s not an MPP like PowerPath/VE, it makes sense, based on their approach for iSCSI redirection.   Anyone have any scoop on that?

Personally, I think this is very, very cool.  While there’s a lot more (hint) that can be done via vCenter and ESX API integration, the really, really cool stuff can only come via the deeper APIs and vmkernel modules.

Comments

[Todd Roberts]

I seem to be having an issue downloading the high-rez version from ftp://ftp.documentum.com/vmwarechampion/Demonstration_Tools/PowerPathVE/PowerPathVE_Install.wmv

[Simon Reynolds]

Thanks for all the great info you provide on your site re using storage with VMware ESX. I have one question.

I've just seen that the VMware HCL has the following footnote for EMC storage arrays with ESX4.0:

"5. Certified with EMC Powerpath/VE MPP plugin applied. Please see http://elabnavigator.emc.com."

This implies that there is no support without Powerpath/VE -- is this true?

[Chad Sakac]

@Simon - Thanks - it's a labor of love :-)

Yeah - that HCL entry is unclear. All the EMC entries on the HCL are **ABSOLUTELY** supported **WITHOUT** PP/VE. That entry is meant to show we certified BOTH with the native multipathing **AND** the PowerPath/VE MPP.

Let me see if I can get an update to clear that up...

[Chad Sakac]

@Todd - I fixed the video (URL boo-boo, and initial upload was truncated), can you try downloading again?

[Todd Roberts]

@Chad - Strange. Still no go.

[StorageGuy]

Chad,

Did you ever test PPVE against the FAS6030? Any performance improvement?