Storage Nation

Happy day for EMC unified customers.   A whole bunch of new integration, additional cost savings – all for existing and new EMC customers.   Oh, and it’s all free Here’s the PR , but in usual fashion, I tend to like the nerd version. Read on for more! So – without further ado, what’s new and GA?

Lots of back and forth with various folks internally on this in the last couple of days, and thought I would just put it out there: Despite the obvious simplicity that would come from directly connecting a UCS to an iSCSI, NFS, FC or FCoE target, this is currently (as of this posting on March 3rd, 2010) not possible with just a UCS chassis and UCS 6100 series fabric interconnect. I’ve had a couple people ask me “why” – after all, they’re just standard SFP+ connectors – you should be able to “plug Tab A into Slot B”. This is not new info (Scott and Rick have hit on this), but since I got asked so much (twice last week at different customers in a New York City tour), I thought I would summarize it here, as our readerships are not the same

The Cisco guys do a killer job on these tight, concise TechWise TV episodes… The one this Thursday is on Vblocks.  Hari is the main man in the VCE solutions squad in Santa Clara, and Vblock builder – a great resource to listen to, talk to and get to know. You can register here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns340/ns339/ns638/ns914/html_TWTV/twtv_episode_62.html?sid=188290_26

The sub-title of my blog is “an insider’s perspective, technical tips n’ tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution”.  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – I think I’ve got the coolest job on the planet    I’ll give you a couple “insider” hints.   2010 will be a very big year on the VMware front – loads of big releases, new functionality and expanding use cases.   Likewise, it’s shaping up to be a block-buster year on the product front at EMC.   The number of “headline” level things down the storage and security fronts between now and EMC World (May) are huge.   Between now and the end of the year – massive. So today, a big move occurred on the management side of the house that’s been underway for a while.   You can read more here . For more detail, and that “insider perspective”, read on… My blog posts are long, and I’m long-winded by nature – so here’s the conclusion before the detail: This is a move where VMware in an instant, makes a quantum increases the depth of resources, tools and capabilities in things that are focused on server-layer and up.   This expands the vCenter family of management capabilities, and the teams that develop them, and the teams take them to market. This is a move where EMC, in an instant, can focus ongoing management M&A and R&D and go to market on the things that focus on UCS, networks, and storage – the server layer and down.  This accelerates EMC’s management efforts

Recently was working a customer case with my VMware colleagues where a customer was seeing that cloning operations were taking a lot longer on their V-Max than it was on their mid-range CXes.   Turned out to be a tricky case, and taught me something new. This experience would apply across more than just EMC arrays, so I thought I would share what we found, how we found it, and what we did about it – in the hopes of helping folks our there. If you’re interested – read on…. I’ve got a mixed readership – some very VMware-centric, some storage-centric, and some brave open minded souls who span both.   Storage-centric folks – bear with this for a bit, as you likely know this, but important to have the VMware-centric folks understand

These EMC IT webcasts are fantastic, and customer feedback has been very positive.   They break down the good/bad/ugly of our journey to the private cloud. This week’s session (Thursday, 8am PT/11am ET)  is on EMC’s own deployment of View 4.   I’m using it right now, and love it!  Of course, there’s still a long way to go (check-in/check-out is big for me).   I use it all the time to access my lab on the corp network – fire up the View client and I am in the core network (extra secured via RSA, which integrates with View Manager). We’re still in the pilot stages with our View 4/Windows 7 activities (hundreds of clients), but so are a lot of customers.   Join in for a perspective (and the upside of the EMC IT folks presenting themselves is it’s not a salesperson   on a 40K employee company’s deployment of client virtualization. http://info.emc.com/mk/get/DBM6065-3450_raf_lp BTW – this is part of a large series.   EMC IT is a massive consumer of the technologies we develop, and is rapidly approaching the 100% virtualized mark for our x86 workloads.

In all seriousness – there’s a ton of going on at EMC focused on Hyper-V, and while I don’t want to help him too much, I do want to make the introduction I mentioned him earlier – Adrian Simays.   Adrian is “Mr Hyper-V” at EMC – and has now been gathering his strength to emerge publicly.   You can read up on EMC stuff focused on Hyper-V here:  Virtual Winfrastructure There’s a great post on all the technical docs on how to leverage Hyper-V on EMC kit which I’m grabbing the links. EMC Symmetrix with Microsoft Hyper-V Virtualization EMC CLARiiON with Microsoft Hyper-V Server Best Practices: Using EMC Celerra IP Storage with Microsoft Hyper-V R2 over iSCSI EMC Replication Manager for Virtualized Environments EMC Blueprint:  Backup and Recovery for Microsoft Sharepoint Server Enabled by EMC CX, Replication Manager and Microsoft Hyper-V EMC Backup and Recovery for Microsoft Sharepoint Server with Hyper-V EMC Networker: Complete Protection for Microsoft Hyper-V Proven Solution: EMC Backup and Recovery for Microsoft Exchange 2007 Enabled by EMC CX, Replication Manager and Microsoft Hyper-V using iSCSI Reference Architecture: EMC Backup and Recovery for Microsoft Exchange 2007 Enabled by EMC CX, Replication Manager and Microsoft Hyper-V using iSCSI Reference Architecture: EMC Solutions for Microsoft SQL Server on EMC Unified Storage Platforms Reference Architecture: EMC Virtual Architecture for Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007 Enabled by EMC CX and Hyper-V Disaster Recovery in a Geographically Dispersed Cross-Site Virtual Environment Enabled by EMC CX, RecoverPoint and Microsoft Hyper-V BTW – if you’re a Microsoft IT user interested at the intersection with infrastructure, another great technical blog to follow (IMO) is Brian’s Power Windows Blog .   Brian, for an example recently posted on all the cool sessions at EMC World that touch on Microsoft technologies. Now, of course, we have MORE of all of this on VMware – a lot more!   It’s just proportionally more based on how often our customers ask for VMware-specific content and integration rather than Hyper-V, but now I’m just smack-talkin’…   Adrian, it’s on  

As discussed here , in VI3.x, any VMs deployed on VMFS via “clone” or “deploy from template” by default use the “eagerzeroedthick” format.  This was the case all the way up to update 5, which fixed this behavior.   vSphere 4 “clone” and “deploy from template” operations have always used the zeroedthick format (exception is a VM configured for Fault Tolerance, or where the administrator forces the eagerzeroedthick option – for a MSCS/WSFC device for example). This is important for the reasons covered in that post ( check it out ) – but the key is that it means you use more storage (a lot more) than needed. I’ll add another reason – it literally doesn’t just consume more storage, but it makes takes that do this “zeroing” (clone, template) take a lot longer than they need to.

EMC solutions enabler 7.1 is out and directly available as a vApp. If you login to Powerlink (EMC partners, customers, employees) you can find it here: Home > Support > Software Downloads and Licensing > Downloads S > Solutions Enabler Here’s a screenshot of the download link.  Personally, I’ve found the vApp package makes deploying solutions enabler (set of tools, public APIs used by many storage-related management tools) much easier.   Remember that if you are using a Symmetrix with Solutions Enabler that you can easily configure gatekeeper LUNs (small LUNs used for inband communication to the Symmetrix) using physical mode RDMs.

There are two important updates to the EMC VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) storage replication adapters (SRAs) for our joint VMware/EMC customers I wanted to make sure everyone knows about. First, the Symmetrix SRDF update. A maintenance release SRDF SRA v2.1.1 was certified yesterday by VMware and is available now for download at: http://www.vmware.com/download/srm/ . The downloaded zip file includes also updated the Release Notes