Get yer EMC FMA Virtual Appliance here!

The FMA (File Management Appliance) is an amazing product.  Simple, but sophisticated.

It will literally migrate files based on a policy (fully automated) from a Celerra or NetApp NAS device to another filesystem or another Celerra or NetApp device – or to a Centera, Data Domain, or Atmos, and is transparent to the end user.

It is fully-automated, policy driven tiering for NAS at the file-level.

 

So – have a Celerra filled with old files?   Great – auto-tier them based on use to Atmos (as a product, or as a cloud service).   Have NetApp devices all over the place filled with old files?  Great – auto-tier them to Data Domain. 

Or – almost any variation of Celerra, NetApp as sources + Centera, Windows fileservers, Data Domain and Atmos as targets.  

When you consider the gobs and gobs of unstructured data out there, the vast VAST majority of which is as cold and idle as can be imagined, the benefit is big.   When you further consider the second order effects of huge unstructured filesystems (longer backup, more time on A/V, impact on NAS system behavior like max filesystem size or time to failover), the benefit is huge.

The FMA is available as a physical device and as a fully supported Virtual Appliance product, though we expect that the physical device will phase out over time, as this is a classic case where there is no real downside to the virtual appliance.

More good news?  You can get download FMA/VE here to play, learn and demo.

A personal thank you to Scott Hall, Kris Cornwall and the FMA engineering and product teams!   Eric Kaplan – thank you too, and good luck at Ahead – they are a great EMC partner!  Tim and gang at Ahead – you have a score there in Eric!

If you are interested in trying it out, of learning more (in the usual “HOWTO 101/201/301” format – excellent work Marcel Brunner – one of my vSpecialist compatriots in Switzerland) – read on…

First – where do you get it?   That’s easy :-)

• You can download the VMware vSphere ESX OVA (644MB) here.
• You can download the VMware Workstation version (655MB) here.

Second – how do you use it?  That’s also easy :-)  We’ve created a document, and a matching video series.

You can download the documentation here…

Here’s the end-to HOWTO video series that documents the processes in the documentation….

Step 1: HOWTO Setup the EMC File Management Appliance Virtual Edition

You can download it in high-rez MOV format here.

Step 2: HOWTO Setup the EMC Celerra to integrate with EMC File Management Appliance 

Note – you can indeed use this with the Celerra VSA.  I would expect that you could also use it with the NetApp sim that exists (but is not on the Internet at large).   If someone has it and wants to share their experiences, it would be welcome input!

You can download it in high-rez MOV format here.

Step 3: HOWTO Configure the EMC File Management Appliance

You can download it in high-rez MOV format here.

Step 4: HOWTO Implementing EMC File Management Appliance policy

You can download it in high-rez MOV format here.

Step 5: Not a step per se, but an end-to-end use case walkthrough.

You can download it in high-rez MOV format here.

I’m on the warpath to make every EMC product available as a virtual appliance.  The Celerra VSA UBER edition is another great example.  We did an EMC World session on implementing Recoverpoint as a VM.   Many more to come.

Would love to hear your input – what do you use FMA/VE for?  What do you think about the use of Virtual Appliances for broad sets of use cases?

Comments

[Ayala Adrian]

Have a bit of experience with Rainfinity and it's been a bad one. Not just with the appliance but also EMC Support.

A few considerations are whether an application will be able to read back data that was archived, Adobe Frameworker being one that has issues.

The celerracallbackdaemon constantly failed on us and required that upgrade the FMA and our FMHA.

[Kris Cornwall]

Hi Adrian,
I'm a member of the File Management Appliance team. While I'm very disappointed to learn that you've had a problem with the product and also with our support services, I'm happy you commented on this post and would very much like the opportunity to help resolve it for you. If you can email me directly and provide some details on what version of FMA and DART you're using as well as the target storage in your environment, then I can work with our escalation engineering organization to get things working for you.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Kris Cornwall, FMA Product Marketing
[email protected]

[adrian]

Hi Kris,
We're currently running the latest code on our FMA and FMHA. We experienced these issues last year. I believe the issue with the version of Frameworker and file call back still stands and the resolution that support came back with is to upgrade to a new version.

The product is great, especially when you're archiving to the Centera.
I just think that our initial experience was great. I'd recommend it to anyone, but first they should try out this VM appliance.

[Kris Cornwall]

Thanks, Chad, for helping us spread the word about FMA/VE and the trial version download. Marcel's How To demos are excellent!

We've created a special site just to make the download files and associated documentation (installation instructions, FAQ, demos etc.) available. This site is also a great place for asking questions, having conversations about FMA/VE, getting the latest news, etc.

https://community.emc.com/community/openexchange/fma-ve

Kris

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=658313066]

We went to hook this up to our Netapp but FMA seems to require a CIFS login to function even if we don't own the CIFS license for our Netapp?
(We are 100% NFS datastores via vFilers)
Why the (apparent) CIFS dependency?

thanks

[Christian]

Hi Chad

Kris and Engineering updated the trial FMA/VE version. The latest version FMA/VE 7.3.2 SP2 is now available for everyone at the FMA/VE Download site: https://community.emc.com/community/openexchange/fma-ve

The update brings DART 6 support. More info on http://powerlink.emc.com ( Home > Support > Technical Documentation and Advisories > Software ~ E-I ~ Documentation > File Management Appliance/VE > Release Notes)

Regards
Christian

[aru]

Hi,

the fmave download link is not available.

Regards,
Aru

[arumon]

Not able to download the documentation. Also the video is not working fine.

[fug u]

Most links on this site fail. And this is not just today

[Bindu]

Hi Guys, Much appreciate for your service and contribution to the community. I am trying to download the FMA VA and its asking for username/password for ftp.documentum.com. Can someone tell me how to download the two appliances