In EMC-land, we have maintainance/service releases for major products – and often these don’t get the glory of the big launches, but contain a TON of important stuff.
Inyo is the code name for the currently shipping VNX Operating Environment that covers NAS and Block functionality (VNX OE 32/7), and Maintenance Release 1 (MR1) shipped to manufacturing on the 19th and is available for general download today (feb 22nd).
This contains a ton (read the release notes here – you can find all sorts of stuff on the VNX page on support.emc.com which is here), but there are 3 things I want to call out:
- Critical VAAI block XCopy fixes (Primus emc313487 – go to http://support.emc.com and just search for the Primus case)
- Huge VAAI File Fastclone improvements
- SMB 3.0 support!
- ODX support!
A little more detail, first on VAAI File Fastclone – this is used predominantly in vCloud Director cases on NFS datastores (something we experienced at SAP, a large VNX customer, but of course there are loads of customers using vCloud Director on VNX NFS). The VAAI assist uses the storage subsystem to “hardware accelerate” the process of creating a VM clone/snapshot. Internal to the VNX today, there can be some recursion of the snapshots of files at the filesystem layer, and then it implements a full file copy. Looking at the case, we made optimizations – and they are BIG (like 4x-10x better), and why keep them for just SAP – good to share with the world :) Here are the before/after that we saw in testing:
| Operation | Inyo | Inyo MR1 |
| VM copy within a fs (VAAI) | 20-60 MB/s | 250 MB/s |
| VM copy between fs same DM(VAAI) | 20-60 MB/s | 270 MB/s |
| Bulk test – copy 200 VMs (VAAI) | N/A (took too long) | 660 MB/s |
On the SMB 3.0 and ODX support – this is a really big deal for our customers using Microsoft (and who doesn’t). I think we actually might be the first of the NAS folks out of the gate with SMB 3.0 – which is a big leap forward in NAS and VMware – not only in the underlying protocol itself, but that SMB can be used with Hyper-V in a way that is very similar to how NFS can be used with vSphere (many of the SMB 2.2 to 3.0 improvements result in SMB being much, much better than in the past for transactional workloads). I could be wrong (I try to avoid talking about other folks like the plague as people jump all over me and assume I’m being competitive – but I do have many NetApp readers) – I believe the NetApp SMB 3.0 support is targeted at ONTAP 8.2.
ODX is a bit of a “catchup” as it’s analagous to the Block XCOPY support in vSphere – but great to see it for our Microsoft-focused brothers and sisters.
Great stuff – and customers, you can get it on Powerlink, but better place is http://support.emc.com (and yes, we are shifting away from the Powerlink model to the more social model – take a look at http://support.emc.com and http://community.emc.com to see the future of Powerlink)
Chad,
Does this release apply to the older Celerra systems as well? Will there be any future code upgrades for that platform?
-Michael
Posted by: Michael Wisenbaker | February 22, 2013 at 02:24 PM
Very nice to hear about the Inyo MR1, VAAI Xcopy fix, and SMB 3.0. Looks very interesting!
Just read the SMB 3.0 WP for VNX from EMC H11427:
EMC VNX Series: Introduction to SMB 3.0 Support
Abstract
This white paper introduces the Server Message Block (SMB) 3.0 support available on the EMC® VNXTM and the advantages gained over the previous SMB versions. A VNX system can be implemented in a Microsoft® Windows® environment (with Microsoft Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012) to leverage the enhancements in the SMB 3.0 protocol.
February 2013
Posted by: Baif | February 24, 2013 at 10:30 PM
Chad, Any ETA on when the new VAAI plug-in (5.1, VUM, INYO support) will be released? support.emc.com still only shows 12/14/2011 version.
Posted by: Michael Pate | February 26, 2013 at 01:27 PM