So much going on - tons of releases

So much going on - so busy :-)

With the start of Q4 (it’s Oct 2nd) - there are lots of releases happening (and I’m sure this is far from exhaustive)

Puppet Enterprise 2015.3 - strange to not start with an EMC or Federation thing - but Puppet is not only a partner, a company/tech I run into frequently at customers, but also a key part of the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud stack. Big release from them around a more complete App Orchestration - here.
VPLEX Geosynchrony 5.5

Optimal Path Management: Optimal Path Management (OPM) enhances VPLEX performance by optimizing distributed cache messaging and cache locality (up to 25% faster for Local, up to 10% faster for Metro)
Back-end path policy to improve throughput and latency
REST API for performance statistics: A new REST enabled CLI command (monitor get-stats) has been added to allow you to gather VPLEX statistics using the REST interface.
Quick vault and restore on power failure: VPLEX now reduces the amount of data at risk on power failure by starting a vault immediately on power loss detection. It also reduces data unavailability by restarting and allowing the VPLEX service on a director to run after the power has been restored on it.·
VPLEX Cluster Witness support for VMware ESXi 6.0
Enhancement to provisioning using VIAS (VPLEX Integrated Array Services): VPLEX release 5.5 has these VIAS enhancements:

now supports provisioning on VMAX3 and XtremIO storage arrays. The supported versions of XtremIO are 4.0.1, 3.0.3, and 3.0.2.
VIAS now supports Service Level Objective (SLO) and workload selection on EMC VMAX3 storage arrays.
Volumes and storage groups are exposed for provisioning in VIAS
You can now specify storage groups for EMC VMAX2 arrays

Of course, ViPR can be used for a broad set of heterogenous integrated provisioning actions, but in the same way that we also keep working to integrate Unisphere across platforms - VIAS is handy for all EMC-customers who have VPLEX fronting EMC platforms - a simpler provisioning model. Cool demo here:

Virtual Storage Integrator 6.6.3. An unbelievable (and still free!) plugin for vCenter and integrates the full EMC portfolio.

EMC Storage Analytics 3.3 - built on vRealize Operations, but an incredible set of capabilities far above and beyond a simple adapter (the adapter is available standalone)

Supports upgrades from VMware vRealize Operations Manager 6.0.x and EMC Storage Analytics 3.2.x.
Supports the OpenStack architecture.
Supports vVNX virtual volumes (VVols) topology and metrics through the VNXe collector.
Provides remedial actions for alerts on VNX, VNXe, and XtremIO arrays.
New XtremIO Volume and Snapshot Tag metrics can be used in association with Custom Groups to group or filter XtremIO volumes and snapshots by Tag value.
Managing Custom Object Groups on the VMware website has more information about Custom Groups.New alerts have been added for RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines.
Metric enhancements for ScaleIO, XtremIO, and VMAX3View/Report templates for VMAX and ScaleIOXtremIO and VMAX performance optimizationVMDK relationships
New VMAX/VMAX3 views/reports
SRDF Topology improvements
Unisphere for VMAX metrics delivered via SMI-S

You can find more details on the VMAX features in the blog below: https://drewtonnesen.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/emc-storage-analytics-esa-3-3/

Lots of stuff - and a lot more to come before VMworld the week of Oct 14th!

Virtual Geek