EMC Virtual Storage Integrator version 5

Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) is a core part of the EMC/VMware integrated value and simplicity.

The idea of using vCenter’s inherent extensibility to make storage, often a pain-in-the-a$$ for VMware administrators and storage administrators, instead simple and easy is a good one.  It’s not one unique to EMC per se, and there were others who did it before us – so I don’t claim to uniqueness or first on this front.

What I can absolutely say is – wow, how fast we accelerated, and how far we have come.   The release is here.

VSI 5.0 is:

• Our 5th generation plugin – I think most are in gen 2 or 3.
• Supports vSphere 5 – quick and early support.  This wasn’t trivial, so don’t be surprised to see delays elsewhere, and is a highlight of our engineering commitment here (there are about 10 engineers who work on this).
• is a single extensible plugin that supports VNXe/VNX/VMAXe/VMAX for all functions – that’s a unified, single way for an incredibly broad set of customers – below $10K all the way to 1,000,000 IOps from a single array.  
  • Unified Storage Management
    • Provision VNX, VNXe, Celerra, and CLARiiON
    • Compress and clone VMs
  • Storage Pool Management
    • Provision Symmetrix VMAX and VMAXe
  • Storage Viewer
    • View storage mapping and connectivity details for VMAX, VMAXe, CLARiiON, Celerra, VNX, VNXe and VPLEX devices
    • New Friendly naming – continuous improvement here…
  • Path Management
    • Manage multipath policies for VMAX, VMAXe, VPLEX, VNX and CLARiiON
  • Symmetrix SRA Utilities
    • Manage vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) configurations in Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (RDF) environments
  • Expect full support for VPLEX (including provisioning), and Isilon to come soon (we previewed Isilon VSI integration in SPO3977).  We also previewed the future Project Lightning integration, performance metrics in SUP1006.   And, wait till you see what’s coming re: alignment and capacity management.
• it has an incredibly robust RBAC model – so that storage administrators can delegate arrays, and pools on arrays to VMware administrators for complete self-service provisioning in a few clicks.  This got considerably enhanced in Version 5.  this is the single biggest inhibitor for our larger customers who are worried about span of control.  It’s solved – check it out!
• We’re continuing to make it simpler to install and use – this is a never-ending journey.

Check it out below:

And – while everyone has plugins (I think I can make an argument that ours is perhaps the best :-), EMC is the only major storage vendor that has completed the equation by making the storage arrays themselves “speak vCenter”.  Unisphere (if you are VNXe or VNX), SMC (if you are VMAXe or VMAX) and ProSphere (if you have many arrays) natively have vCenter integration.  Provide read-only credentials to vCenter and voila – the storage team has VM-object awareness (for fault, capacity, performance) directly in the array itself. 

As far as I know, only a small startup Tintri has something somewhat analgous. (please readers, correct me if I’m wrong) – so much for innovation only coming from the startups :-)

BTW – when people call it “VM-awareness” (including me), it’s a stretch.  EMC, Tintri, everyone presents either LUNs or NFS filesystems to ESX hosts.   Then, we use vCenter APIs to map the relationships – which is great, but the storage subsystem still “speaks” blocks, files – not “VMs”.  If you want a preview of what REAL VM granular storage models in “future vSphere releases”, check out VSP3205 – many of the demos brought to you by  your friends at VMware and EMC :-)

BEST OF ALL – IT IS ALL FREE FOR VMWARE/EMC CUSTOMERS.

If you’re a customer and aren’t using this, you’re missing out.  Don’t take it from me – listen to your fellow customer:

“At Experian we have a large, dynamic and growing VMware vSphere® environment and need to simplify the management of it.  We use EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) to dramatically accelerate and simplify storage configuration, management, and multipathing and it has saved us days of work.  We currently also have a Hitachi USPv where we do most of the tasks manually that VSI helps us automate in EMC environment. The fact that it was included at no cost with the array is awesome!   We’re really excited about the new features in VSI 5 and wish we had more tools like this that help us simplify our environment and increase productivity.” - Mike Schlimenti, Lead Systems Engineer, Data Center at Experian. “

(psst… HDS – sounds like you should get cracking on your vCenter plugins)

Comments

[Daniel Pfuhl]

Hi Chad,

is it also running on vSphere 4.1?

Best regards,

daniel

[Steven Nekava]

Chad,
Great post. I personally love the VSI and think it delivers tremendous value to our customers. I liked this post on RBAC to the storage from vCenter but was wondering how we tackle continued role change and update... What I mean simply is what happens if I'd like to periodically change, monitor and manage access to pools and arrays for a fairly large VMware team as a storage admin. Where can I view who has access to what? What happens when I need to modify the access levels across a team of VM administrators? is file export the only way to make changes today? Is this changing in the future?