EMC’s Next-Generation vCenter Plugins

I’m happy to announce a major update to the family of EMC vCenter plugins!   BTW – some of you may know that these have been out for a while, but we were waiting for EMC World to announce them.

The theme of this latest generation of plugins is “self service for the VMware administrator” – across every EMC platform, protocol, and scale.

The best way to understand what’s in there now is to watch the demonstration, right here.

(big thanks to the E-Lab crew – I’ve got a lot of kit, but showing how VSI covers Symmetrix, CLARiiON and Celerra demands more than I can do :-)

Download the high-rez versions here: WMV and MOV

All these plugins are generally available.  It’s also worth noting that the vCenter plugins which provide visibility AND provisioning are just PART of how EMC’s storage integrates with VMware.  Not only do we cover the basics (on HCL, have SRAs) we also:

• some of our platforms connect directly to the vCenter APIs (Unipshere for midrange block/NAS, Recoverpoint) to provide VM-level awareness directly in their GUIs.
• Our midrange platforms automatically  have all initiators register with them (FLARE 29 and later)
• We have vCenter/ESX API integrated and application-integrated (Exchange/SQL Server/Sharepoint/Oracle) snapshots and remote replication in EMC Replication Manager
• we leverage the vStorage APIs for Data Protection, changed block tracking and vCenter API integration in Avamar 5
• we have extended SRM by providing automated failback capabilities in advance of VMware’s next major Site Recovery Manager release.
• we support the vStorage APIs for Multipathing with EMC PowerPath (adaptive/predictive queue management and automation of every multipathing task)
• we support the vStorage APIs for Array Integration – hardware offloading most common storage tasks (this supported on the FLARE revision announced today, and requires a future vSphere release which enables support in vSphere)

If you want a quick PDF on the set of EMC’s storage vCenter plugin integration capabilities, click on the link below.

 

As always – EMC’s vCenter plugins are provided for FREE. 

I’m always shocked when I find people who aren’t using them.   What more do we need to do to make things easier for you? :-)  

Here’s my offer.  If you’re an EMC customer – and have trouble installing and configuring this plugin, let me know – post to the Everything VMware at EMC community, and I’ll have someone come and help you.

If you want to understand more – read on!

First of all – the big-daddy:

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (or VSI) is the main EMC vCenter plugin.  Over time, more and more functions that currently require installing one or more additional plugins will fold into the EMC Virtual Storage Integrator.  We’re beefing up the team behind it, and they have a very aggressive roadmap (wait till you see what’s next!!!)

So – what does it do?

• EMC VSI provides visibility all the storage relationships in a VMware environment with EMC storage – regardless of platform or protocol.
• You can see the relationships/consumption/configuration between VMFS and NFS datastores and their underlying storage (down to very granular detail)
• You can see the relationships/consumption/configuration between VMs, Virtual disks/VMDKs, and their underlying storage
• You can see the relationships/consumption/configuration between ESX hosts and the array targets.
• You can see and even modify some replication relationships
• You can sort/filter and export all the data (very handy)

The biggest thing (beyond consistent functionality across all EMC platforms, protocols and scales is Storage Pool management), which is why we couldn’t call it “storage viewer” anymore, because you can provision directly.new

So – what’s that all about? 

Well – first of all a quick detour to discuss what our customers were telling us.   In the mid-market, customers were a-ok with VMware administrators being able to provision across the entire array.  In some cases at smaller customers, the VMware admin were the same person.

But, in our larger account, whether they had hyper-consolidated their storage and a single array was supporting a multitude of host types, applications and more – the idea that any group could provision, willy nilly (even with access controls) across the array – well, it was a non-starter.

So, on VMAX, the engineers added an interesting capability – something called storage pool manager.   This enables the Storage team to create one or more virtually provisioned pools of storage, and assign in a SLA grade then “hand it over” to another owner who can then provision however they would like – but without affecting anything else.

In vCenter – the VMware administrator can then assign those pools by giving “allocations” to vSphere clusters, hosts, or even DRS resource pools.   A neat idea, and something I think we’ll add over time to midrange block and NFS use cases as the mid-range provisioning functions

The additional vCenter plugins are also delivered NOW and offer platform-wide self-service for VMware administrators for EMC CLARiiON (across all protocols supported by , but via another plugin that needs to simultaneously be installed.

EMC CLARiiON vCenter Plugin

This plugin is designed to add extensive self-service provisioning and replication to the Virtual Storage Integrator plugin for EMC’s midrange block storage (standalone CLARiiONs or block storage in EMC Celerras – iSCSI, FC, etc.).

• You can provision with a single click.   Every step from beginning to end (including getting the VMFS datastore up across every node of the cluster) is automated.
• You can extend and delete VMFS volumes
• You can leverage array based snapshots for mass deployment of VMs (datastore level operation).

Note that this plugin, while available is supported on a best-effort basis until it rolls into the Virtual Storage Integrator, which will be soon.   This doesn’t mean “don’t use it”, it means “unlike the VSI and the NFS plugin that are supported by EMC with the usual support EMC customers are accustomed to, please use the “Everything VMware at EMC Community” for best effort support.”

EMC Celerra NFS vCenter Plugin

This plugin is designed to add extensive self-service provisioning and replication to the Virtual Storage Integrator plugin for EMC’s NAS storage (EMC Celerras)

• You can provision with a single click.   Every step from beginning to end (including getting the NFS datastore up across every node of the cluster) is automated.
• You can extend and delete NFS volumes
• It automatically applies ESX and Celerra best practices (including the appropriate ESX timeout values and Celerra options so important in VMware NFS use cases) to current and existing datastores
• You can leverage array based snapshots for mass deployment of VMs (datastore level and vm-level operation) – these can be snapshots (consume no space) or clones (consume space, but can be in another filesystem)
• You can leverage Celerra compression (datastore and VM-level operation).

Nothing like some killer freebies :-)

Comments

[CC]

Chad,

Your link to the document doesn't work. Says I got no permission.

Was I bad :).

More cool stuff.

[Unexpected]

I'll be trying the Celerra plugin soon - thanks for the heads-up!

[Markus]

Where can I get this plugins? I can' t find them

[VirtualProUK]

Another superbly detailed post and one that makes me glad to be a vSphere and EMC CLARiiON customer. Such tight integration is really starting to leave the rest trailing in EMC's wake.

I noticed that the PDF has a Powerlink location listed for the CLARiiON plugin but there is nothing in that location for CLARiiON, only the Celerra. I posted on the "everything VMware at EMC" community about it so hopefully someone has it sorted soon.

[Kelly]

Ahhh, we can now finally use the hardware to accelerate VM deployments, would be nice when VMWare View uses this :)

Awesome news Chad!! We want more!!

[ThatFridgeGuy]

An update on the CLARiiON plugin from EMC's EverythingVMware forum:
======================
The plug-in for Clariion is not GA yet and hence its not available on Powerlink. It will be coming out soon, probably sometimes this quarter.
Best Regards
Ashok Bhojwani
Sr. vSpecialist | VMware Technical Alliance
======================
https://community.emc.com/thread/103899?tstart=0

[forbsy]

Congrats for finally getting EMC storage integrated with vCenter. Seems identical to Netapp Virtual Storage Console (VSC), Rapid Cloning Utility (RCU) and MultiStore. Keep up the good work.

[timkos]

Hi Chad,

is there something similar in planning for Hyper-V/SCVMM?

[Chad Sakac]

@forsby, thanks, BTW, just to be clear - EMC released our vCenter plugin before VSC released. Second, as far as I know, NetApp has yet to integrate either filerview or NSM with the vCenter APIs (like we did with our array element manager - and also with Recoverpoint - early last year). Third - automated host registration between vSphere and the storage targets.

Those are several of a long list of things we did before NetApp when it comes to VMware integration. Of course, there are things they do before we do, but I want to set the record straight: its a case of leapfrog, each having different leads in different areas first, but no one (no storage vendor that's for sure) should throw stones - we all live in glass houses.

@timkos - thanks for the question - the answer is a firm YES. There is already a powershell cmlet set of tools, stay tuned working on SCVMM integration.

@thatfridgeguy - the CX team decided to take a couple extra weeks to make the "best effort support" turn into "supported like any other product" - will be out very, very shortly.

[Virtual_JTW]

Where's support for Celerra iSCSI?!?! Is this just a "I gotta compete with Netapp" thing? Should I be moving to NFS datastores?

[PxPx]

I have upgraded to Flare 30 which was a huge pain took 9 hours for the tech. Finally got Solutions Enabler and PowerPath setup with lack of good documentation. So now I can see my Celerra in vSphere. All of my storage is ISCSI. So how do you provision storage from vCenter for new Virtual Machines. What Component do I need.

I have the celerra plugin installed but its worthless because I dont have any NFS. I also have the virtual storage integrator installed.

[PxPx]

I have a Celerra with ISCSI I tried installing the Clarrion Plugin but it said I needed Navisphere v29 running. We have flare 30 with Unisphere. How do I provision storage with the Celerra on ISCSI through vCenter?