Thanks to our friends at EMC, I was recently given the chance to attend a session on EMC’s new storage acquisition, ScaleIO. This acquisition generated a lot of interest (and perhaps some confusion) as VMware Virtual SAN product seemed to play in that same storage area. My good friend Chad Sakac over at EMC wrote about this some 6 months ago in his evocatively titled blog post VSAN vs. ScaleIO fight! Chad explains where, in his opinion, each product can be positioned and how EMC/VMware customers have a choice of storage options. His article is definitely worth a read. I…
I’ve been presenting at a number of conferences over the past number of weeks/months, both internal and external. While a lot of my sessions have focused around Virtual SAN (VSAN), I got a number of questions around whether or not the new Software Defined Storage product from EMC, ViPR, competes with or complements Virtual SAN. Since ViPR 1.0 is now available (since September), and a new release of ViPR is due out before the end of the year, I thought I’d take a closer look at what ViPR is all about and try to answer that question.
Hmm, it seems to be the week that’s in it for storage issues. After publishing the DELL EQL & VMFS issue earlier this week, I have now been given a heads-up on an EMC VNXe & iSCSI issue. The symptoms are ESXi hosts being unable to boot from an iSCSI LUN on the VNXe or ESXi hosts losing connectivity to iSCSI datastores.
I just got a notification about this myself today. Apparently there is some interoperability issues with VAAI (vSphere APIs for Array Integration) & EMC RecoverPoint on EMC VNX arrays. It looks like the VNX Storage Processor (SP) may reboot with Operating Environment Release 32 P204 in a RecoverPoint environment. EMC have just released today a technical advisory – ETA emc327099 – which describes the issue in more detail but is basically advising customers to disable VAAI on all ESXi hosts in the RecoverPoint environment while they figure this out. Hopefully it won’t take too long to come up with a…
There is no doubt that Flash is hot right now. Over the past number of months, we have seen IBM acquire Texas Memory Systems (TMS), HDS unveil their own flash strategy and HP launch their all flash 3PAR P1000 array. Of course regular readers of my blog will have seen my posts about newer all flash array vendors such as Pure Storage, Violin Memory & Nimbus Data. The purpose of this post is to highlight XtremIO’s flash storage solution which was recently acquired by EMC.
In this post, I want to call out two important matters related to the vSphere 5.1 release & EMC storage. The first is related to Round Robin Path Policy changes, and the second relates to a VMFS5 volume creation issue.
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.