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EMC Isilon – OneFS Mavericks Release Overview

EMC Isilon are providing even further vSphere integration features in their upcoming ‘Mavericks’ release of their OneFS operating system. This is great to see. The integration is in the area of vSphere APIs, both for Array Integration (VAAI) &  Storage Awareness (VASA).

Let’s have a look at the VAAI enhancements first.

1. VAAI NAS integration

These primitives, of course, require the EMC Isilon VAAI NAS plugin, but this is easily installed via VUM, the VMware Update Manager. After watching some of the tests, the improvement is significant. An offline clone operation of a 120GB VM took about 7 minutes 15 seconds without VAAI. With VAAI, it took 1 minute and 29 seconds. This was almost 5 times faster. Nice!

2. VASA

vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness, commonly referred to as VASA, is a set of APIs that permits storage arrays to integrate with vCenter for management functionality.

Isilon are now surfacing up a bunch of device capabilities with VASA. These are now visible in the vSphere client when examining datastores.

Capability

Description

ARCHIVE Datastore resides on Isilon NL-series hardware
CAPACITY Datastore resides on Isilon X-Series hardware
HYBRID Datastore resides on a mixed Isilon hardware configuration
INVALID Datastore resides on a mixed Isilon hardware configuration
PERFORMANCE Datastore resides on Isilon S-Series hardware or SSD accelerated storage
ULTRA_PERFORMANCE Datastore resides on Isilon S-Series hardware with SSD acceleration
UNKNOWN The Storage Capability for this object is Unknown

This is great to see. Isilon customers who deploy the VASA plugin along with upgrading to the Mavericks release can now reap the full benefits of VMware’s Profile Driven Storage feature. What this means is that deployments of VMs will always be error free, allowing you to select the correct datastore for your VM each & every time. The other benefit is that you can constantly check the compliance state of your VMs storage throughout its life-cycle (e.g. detect if someone inadvertently migrated to a lower tier of backing storage). You can learn more about Storage Profile but this blog post I did on the vSphere Storage Blog.

We don’t have enough vendors doing offloading with VAAI NAS, so it is a welcome sign to see Isilon introduce this. And I certainly like the VASA capability descriptions that they are surfacing up – I think this make it nice and clear to Isilon customers what sort of device(s) are backing their respective datastores.

EMC are a diamond sponsor at this years VMworld 2012 in San Francisco. I’m sure Jay, James and the rest of the Isilon team would be delighted to show you these new features. You’ll find those guys at booth 1203.

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