3 Pieces of “Bad” News and a Deep Dive into APD

[UPDATE June 28th,2012 9:00am ET – fixed a broken link]

So – last week’s EMC/VMware webcast was… funky.  AFAIK, it might just be a first – a wide open webcast where we publicly “out” some EMC gaffes, bugs, and other things.   In this case, we discussed recent issues with VMware vSphere and: VMAX w VAAI, VNX w VAAI, and PP/VE causing PSODs.

I’m a big believer in as much transparency as possible.   It’s also good to communicate to our customers – I think sharing…

• What these issues are
• How they happen
• What we (VMware/EMC) do about them – both as a fix to the immediate issue, and a fix to the process gap that lead to the point where it occured.

… is healthy – as it is all about customer focus.

This first topic included a detailed discussion on the bugs themselves and how customers and partners can take advantage of VMware/EMC communications to be aware and resolve issues.

The second topic is an important one for any customer using any vendor’s block storage with VMware. The All Paths Down (APD – also sometimes called “All Paths Dead” – a bit more somber) behavior has changed a lot from vSphere 4.0, through the updates, and also in vSphere 4.1, and will continue to change in future vSphere releases. Understanding APD will help make your vSphere environment more resilient.

You can watch the recorded webcast HERE.   As I always try to do, I’ve also uploaded the raw PPT (in spite of the fact that our competitors regularly lift them – even with the EMC copyright clearly noted).  

I post it all (and hold the webcast) it in the hope that it is useful for EMCers, EMC partners, VMware, and of course customers. 

In my view, as industry leaders, so long as we develop good products, fix issues quickly, and maintain customer focus – I worry little about the “other guy.”

Comments

[Greg Carriger]

I really enjoyed the webcast and was amazed that there was no sales pitch. You can bet I'll be signing up for the rest of these. Way more useful than other webcasts with exciting titles having to do with weather patterns or accounting terms.

[Daniel Pfuhl]

Hi Chad,

that kind of information is really driving us forward. If we know the pitfalls we can navigate around them!!

Best regards

daniel

[iwan 'e1' Rahabok]

Thanks for sharing.
Followers can compare with one another by looking left, right, or to the front.
A leader does not as there is no one on his left, right or in front of him.

[keith]

This is exactly the kind of information that we need and appreciate the most. In many cases, you only find out about this stuff after you experience a problem (often leading to an outage of some sort).

I hope this is the first of many, and that EMC embraces disseminating more information this format. Thanks Chad.

[Itzik]

one correction, in the case of the Symmetrix VMAX, the XCOPY primitive will work in the case of SRDF (R1, R2), it wont however work in the case of Timfinder SNAP/CLONE