EMC Elect 2015 – update your badges..!

Posted on February 24, 2015 by admin

Just a few hours ago, EMC announced the list of EMC Elects for the year of 2015. It took a while this year, but the official list finally came with 102 well deserved candidates.

It is a great honor to be a part of the list, to be named among the community leaders..!

EMC Elect 2015

I am taking this moment to congratulate all the EMC Elects for the year 2015..!

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EMC Elect is the recognition program from EMC, which recognizes contribution from people around the globe towards the EMC community. You may read more about the program here and you may read the FAQs about the program here.

This year there were 450 nominations, 200 among them were shortlisted and the most deserving 102 nominations are selected to represent the class of 2015. The members of this year’s list includes 45 EMC employees, 38 from EMC Partner organizations, 12 from customers and 6 from independent organizations (+ Howard Marks, the only analyst listed).

Each and every nomination undergoes strict judging to ensure only the best are selected. The judging is done based on the

  • Regular engagement on the EMC Community Network
  • Great conversations on Twitter
  • Strong technical presence via blogs and at industry events

You may find the full list of EMC Elect 2015 and the announcement here .

Well done, keep contributing ..!

Posted in Announcements, EMC, Recognition program | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

VSPEX BLUE – EMC’s Hyper-Converged Infrastructure offering

Posted on February 8, 2015 by admin

EMC announced VSPEX Blue, their Hyper-Converged Infrastructure offering earlier this week. With this product EMC is entering to the Hyper-Converged infrastructure market using VMware’s EVO:RAIL software. EMC is Redefining Simplicity by simplifying the IT infrastructure deployment and management.

VSPEXBLUE_vipinvk.in

Here in this post let us get into the details of this new offering..

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EMC VSPEX was launched in 2012, converged infrastructure architecture which offered easy implementation of Private Cloud and End-User Computing. VSPEX BLUE is the latest offering from from the VSPEX family. This is a true hyper-converged infrastructure – compute, storage, networking and management – all in a 2U 4 node hardware with the SDDC (Software-Defined Data Center) building block.

As mentioned already above, EMC is using the EVO:RAIL software from VMware for enabling the hyper-converged feature. EVO:RAIL is the HCIA (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Architecture) from VMware which are being supplied via partners. EMC customized the software to have additional features such as support for ESRS, RecoverPoint for VMs etc…

The Hardware

VSPEX BLUE comes with 2U appliance and can have up to a 4 appliances in cluster. Single appliance will have 4 nodes.The below image shows the appliance from the front.

VSPEXBLUE_hardware2_vipinvk.in

The hardware configuration for a single node will be,

  • Dual Intel Ivy Bridge E5-2620 V2 processors with a total of 12 cores @ 2,1Ghz
  • 3 x 1.2TB 2.5” 10K RPM SASHDD
  • 1 x 400GB 2.5” SAS SSD (VSAN Cache)
  • 1 x 32GB SLC SATADOM (ESXi Boot Image)
  • 2 x 10GBE BaseT or SFP+

There are 2 memory variance available with VSPEX BLUE appliance, 192 GB ad 128 GB. The system with 128GB memory per node is called a Standard model and the one with 192GB is the performance model.

VSPEX BLUE deployment – initialization and set up – are all really simple . Customers can start provisioning VMs just in 15 minutes of power up..! The addition of an appliance adds all the components – compute, storage, networking and management. This scales up the cluster linearly and performance also increases linearly.

Patching/Upgrade are all NDU with zero downtime.

A very handy, VSPEX BLUE manager  is the management software with VSPEX BLUE. It very well integrates with the EVO:RAIL software. It provides a great support experience with the ESRS/VE integration. Also VSPEX BLUE Manager is well hardware aware and gives graphical view of the hardware failures etc…

Support logs are collected automatically and are integrated with the vRealize Log Insight. VSPEX BLUE Manager gives the customer the detailed information of the installed softwares too. VSPEX BLUE Market option integrates access to qualified software products for VSPEX BLUE and VMware.

RecoverPoint for VMs is a qualified software which provides Synchronous and Asynchronous replication options with VSPEX BLUE. An appliance will have free license for 15 VMs support with RecoverPoint for VMs.

VSPEX BLUE, is expected to have upcoming models to be announced in the Q2, 2015. The product model announced on  3rd February will be GA later in February.

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VMware vExpert 2015 announced..!

Posted on February 6, 2015 by admin

vExpert 2015..!!

In a VMTN blog yesterday (5th Feb) VMware announced the list of vExperts for the year of 2015. It’s a great honor to be a part of the list, being named among many great personalities, IT experts. For me it’s now the second time in a row to be the part of the list.

 

vExpert logo

 

I would like to take this moment to congratulate all my fellow vExperts.

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This year’s list contains ~1K (Yes, I meant 1024) experts who made great contributions to the community through their blogs, support forum engagements, technical speeches, social events and more.  You can find the official announcement and the full experts list here

It’s a very tough task to select the most deserved from thousands of applications. The judging panel did a great job and the team surely deserves a shout out.

If you missed to apply for this year’s vExpert program, don’t worry – you’ve got a second chance. There will be a second half for 2015 vExpert list, for which applications will be starting soon. Apply for the program without failure and keep contributing. Keep doing the great work..

All the best..!

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vSphere 6 enhancements – Let’s take a look

Posted on February 5, 2015 by admin

Finally, VMware launched the long waited vSphere 6 this week, on 2nd February. A lot of enhancements..!  – new features and increased maximums. With the new features vSphere now enables improved SDDC (Software-Defined Data Center) support and contributing more towards the Hybrid-Cloud. vSphere 6, not just like any other version upgrades came up with a lot many brand-new features.

vSphere6
Here in this post I am discussing some of the added features/ feature enhancements in vSphere 6. Continue reading →

SCALABILITY

vSphere supports more hosts and hardware, almost double compared to the previous version. Let us first see some of the increased maximums with vSphere 6.

  • Cluster can scale up to 64 hosts  [32 hosts in version 5.5]
  • Support up to 8000VM’s on a single cluster  [4000VMs in vSphere 5.5]
  • Support 480 Physical CPU’s , 12 TB RAM  [320 physical CPUs and 4TB  in previous version]

VM’s now will support 128 vCPU’s and 4TB RAM with the virtual hardware v11. It also support the Hot-add of RAM and increased serial/parallel port support.

STORAGE ENHANCEMENTS AND VMOTION

A storage architecture with vSphere 6 is entirely different from the previous versions. Storage admins used to allocate the LUNs to the datastore and VMware admins create the VMs from the datastore with a specified amount of storage to each host. This used to cause under-utilization of space to some VMs and which in turn caused space issue at the backend.

With vSphere 6, vVols uses the space effectively and makes easier storage management. Storage for VMs are being utilized from a common pool here which makes better resource utilization. Also we can have different policies set for different VM’s storage based on our requirement. Policies can be changed any time.

This new architecture helps in offloading the data services and makes the LUN management easier.

vMOTION

vMotion is another feature which have major enhancements with vSphere 6. The enhancements in vMontion are listed below,

  1. Cross vSwitch vMotion
  2. Cross vCenter vMotion
  3. Long Distance vMotion
  4. vMotion across L3 boundaries

AVAILABILITY

vSphere 6 have improved Replication and HA enhancements. Also FT (Fault Tolerance) support also increased from 1 vCPU (till vSphere 5.5) to 4 vCPU. MSCS clustering also have some great improvements compared to the previous versions.

For vSphere Replication, vSphere 6 have reduced the bandwidth requirements by advanced compression. Changed Data will get compressed at the source remain compressed till the same is written to the storage.  There is also performance improvements with the new Replication.

vCenter Server

vCenter Server have massive enhancements with the new release. Additions include new architecture with the Platform Services Controller (PSC) and improved performance and scalability.

PSC moved the services from vCenter server and made them available through the centralized vCloud suite. This makes centralized management of common platforms. With this vCenter installation and upgrades are faster now.

With the new version there is a huge performance improvement with the vCenter server and the guest operating systems support is also expanded.

Considering backup solutions for your VMs ? Try Nakivo for your VMware, Hyper-V and EC2 instances backups.

You can find more posts from vExperts on the vSphere 6 announcement here

Posted in Announcements, Vitulization, VMware | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Pluralsight acquired Code School, interesting – isn’t it ?

Posted on January 28, 2015 by admin

Pluralsight one of the leading online learning service recently announced (Press Release) that they have acquired Code School, another great learning initiative. This $36M deal  brings an opportunity for the online learners to have access for even more resources from this one-stop-shop. Code School is covering courses from coding/scripting for developers including Java Scripting, HTML, iOS etc…

pluralsight

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Pluralsight carries huge number of courses from various domains including serves, networking, virtualization, storage etc… It has a well classified set of resources for people from different knowledge levels (beginners to experts ), and from various skills.

In 2013 when the company acquired TrainSignal, the site became very rich on virtualization/VMware contents. With the new addition – Code School – the added contents from coding and developments arena will set new definitions for online learning.

As part of the celebrations, Pluralsight (link here) and Code School (link here) are offering free training for 72 hours for registrations before 30th Jan.

I got access to one year of free training from Pluralsight as part of the offer for Tech VIPs (MVPs, vExperts, EMC Elects, Cisco Champions etc…). Thanks to pluralsight for this great offer, which enabled me to access lots of resources on storage/virtualization – which are of my interest. Looking forward for more great initiatives from Pluralsight..!

Posted in Announcements, Education, General | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Stay tuned, there’s something really big coming from VMware

Posted on January 17, 2015 by admin

Yes, Stay tuned for this February. There is a very big announcement coming from VMware. The details of the announcement are yet to be known, but something you should never miss for sure.

LOGO1

The big event, scheduled for 2nd February is being made available to viewers from around the world. You can attend the session by registering via http://www.vmware.com/now.

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The timings are as below for the online sessions with respect to different locations.

AMERICAS
Date: February 2, 2015
Time: 1:00 – 2:00 PM PST / 4:00 – 5:00 PM EST

EMEA
Date: February 3, 2015
Time: 9:00 – 10:00 AM GMT / 10:00 – 11:00 AM CET

ASIA PACIFIC – ASEAN, Western Australia, Hong Kong
Date: February 5, 2015
Time: 10:00 – 11:00 AM SGT

ASIA PACIFIC – Sydney, Australia
Date: February 5, 2015
Time: 10:00 – 11:00 AM AEDT

ASIA PACIFIC – Mumbai, India
Date: February 5, 2015
Time: 10:30 – 11:30 AM IST

I Don’t want to predict the content from the announcement, lets wait for some more days. More from the announcement soon..!

 

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RecoverPoint for VMs – now available for free download..!

Posted on January 9, 2015 by admin

EMC announced RecoverPoint for VMs in August last year which redefines the data protection for virtualized environments. It allows the administrator for easy recovery to any Point-in-Time, at VM level granularity. This allows the specific VM to have the protection defined – but not at the datastores/LUN level – with both local and remote replication capability.

Now we can download this product for free..!! Only need to pay for support.RecoverPointVM

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You can download RecoverPoint for VMs from this page.  You can find the system requiremetns etc.. also in the same page.

Let’s now get into more of this product,

RecoverPoint for VMs works at the HyperVisor layer, with the embedded splitter (Embedded Hypervisor Splitter) at the vSphere Kernel . It works at the virtual SCSI layer of the ESXi. We have to install this in ESXis of whose VMs need to be protected and this is done through standard VIB. Hence RP for VMs is Storage-agnositc and supports various SAN, NAS, DAS and vSAN systems available.

As per the data protection policies set on each VM, all the write data are duplicated and sent to the virtual appliance for journaling (the other copy goes to the VMDK for the VM as usual). This defines the protection for the VM. Consistency Groups are also available and we can have the VMs part of Consistency groups according to the protection requirements.

RecoverPointVMs

vCenter Plugin for RecoverPoint for VMs makes things easy for administrators. The management of RecoverPoint Virual Appliances are performed via this plugin. We have to install this plugin in all the vCenter servers which are part of the replicated environment. Recovery opeartions can only be performed via vCenter Plugin for RecoverPoint for VMs.

Policy templates are available to administrators for defining protection for VMs. Administrators can define his own custom policies also as per requirement. These policies enables the admin to define the various attribute settings including RPO, WAN optimization and protection window. A VM which is ongoing a storage vMotion or vMotion, will still remain protected with RecoverPoint.

The image below shows the local and Remote data protection with RecoverPoint for VMs, also makes easy for us to understand various components in the data flow.

RecoverPoint for VMs

You can read more specifications here.

Thus the software is now free. If you have the lab set up, it’s your time to do all the testing with the new Software Defined VM Protection.

 

Posted in EMC, Replication, Vitulization | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Happy New Year 2015..!

Posted on December 29, 2014 by admin

Its time to say good bye to 2014 and welcome the new year 2015.It was a great year for me personally and professionally. Hope it was the same or even better for you also.

I wish you all my friends a happy new year 2015…!

Happy New Year

 

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Cisco champions 2015 – Yes, I’m in..!

Posted on November 30, 2014 by admin

CiscoChampion200PX

Cisco champions for the 2015 was announced last week and it’s a great feeling to know I am in the list for the next year too.. The second time in a row..!

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Cisco Champions is a great community recognition program from Cisco, which is now stepping towards the second year after a great successful first year. It recognizes the outstanding contributions of people from various areas of IT. You can read more about the program here.

It was great first year of knowledge sharing, events etc… Cisco champions are invited to special blogger briefing sessions, Cisco champion radio sessions and more with a lot of learning and fun. I am pretty sure the coming year will be of more learning and fun.

You can find some of the Cisco Champions here and know more about them.

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VMAX – Expanding a Thin pool via symcli

Posted on November 15, 2014 by admin

We had discussed about deleting a Thin pool here in one of our previous post. Now we will discuss how to expand a thin pool via symcli, i.e, adding more TDATs to the pool.

We can first make a note of pool details by running,

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symcfg -sid 1234 show -pool T_Pool_1 -thin -detail

We have to identify the candidate TDATs, which can be added to the pool. We have to find the nonpooled TDAT devices from the required disk group.

symdev list -sid 1234 -datadev -disk_group 3 -nonpooled

This will list all the TDATs from disk group 3 which are not part of any pool. We can select the devices as per our size requirements etc…  Here we have identified the devices AAAA through BBBB as the candidate TDATs.

The below command will add those devices to the pool,

symconfigure -sid 1234 -cmd “add dev AAAA:BBBB to pool T_Pool_1, type=thin, member_state=ENABLE;” commit -v -nop

If you are not using the member_state=ENABLE , the added TDATs will be in disabled state and you will have to manually enable them by running,

symconfigure -sid 1234 -cmd “enable dev AAAA:BBBB in pool T_Pool_1, type=thin;” commit -v -nop

Once you have the devices added and enabled , you will be able to see the new TDATs under the enabled devices in show -pool command output. Now the data is there in the existing TDATs and you will have to do a re-balancing of the data in pool by running the below command,

symconfigure -sid 1234 -cmd “start balancing on pool T_Pool_1, type=thin;” commit -v -nop

You can verify the pool state by running the show -pool command. The pool state now should be rebalancing from enabled.

Now you may change the maximum subscription limit for the pool. If you don’t want over subscription for the pool, you may set the maximum subscription percent as 100, otherwise can be some values higher than 100.

symconfigure -sid 1234 -cmd “set pool T_Pool_1, type=thin, max_subs_percent=100;” commit -v -nop

So that’s it you have added the devices to pool and balanced it. Now you should be able to see the added space and will be able to bind more thin devices to your pool.

 

Posted in EMC, Symmetrix, VMAX | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment