With all the news releases at EMC World around Isilon with virtualization and the cloud, I thought it would be a good time to bring this article back up. Isilon is continuing to add more integration with VMware into its offering, with the recent past additions of integration and support of VMware’s Site Recovery Manager and integration of Isilon into the vCenter client itself, Isilon has been making steady progress. However, with OneFS 7.0 they are now integrating VASA and VAAI supportability as well strengthening Isilon even further with customers who are running NFS for their VMware environment. So all that being said let’s take a look at why Isilon is a great fit for use in your VMware environment.

Read more after the bump!

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With EMC PowerPath/VE, you can now deliver advanced PowerPath features to streamline and automate I/O performance of VMware vSphere (ESX server 4) virtual environments.

With EMC PowerPath/VE, you can standardize path management across heterogeneous physical and virtual environments and automate and optimize virtual server, storage, and path utilization in a dynamic virtual environment. This eliminates the need to manually load-balance virtual machines and I/O-intensive applications in hyper-consolidated environments.

The trial software may be downloaded on Powerlink or off of EMC Community Network (ECN), see appropriate path and URL below:

Powerlink: Home > Support > Software Downloads and Licensing > Downloads P-R > PowerPath for VMware

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/appmanager/km/secureDesktop?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=servicesDownloadsTemplatePg&internalId=0b014066804211df&_irrt=true

ECN: PowerPath/VE Community on EMC Community Network (ECN)

http://community.emc.com/go/powerpath-ve

You may also contact your eGroup account manager with any questions!

The PowerPath family provides advanced path management with multipathing for physical and virtual environments, nondisruptive migration, and encryption capabilities.

• PowerPath Multipathing and PowerPath/VE are host-resident software applications that intelligently manage host-to-storage I/O data paths to maximize the performance and availability of mission-critical applications in physical and virtual environments.
• PowerPath Migration Enabler insulates hosts from changes in the storage infrastructure; allows nondisruptive data migrations; and enables array-based replication, virtualization, and host-based migrations to eliminate application downtime during data migrations or virtualization implementations. It enables migrations through an array, within an array, through the network, or through the host.
• PowerPath Encryption with RSA is a host-based, data-at-rest encryption solution utilizing RSA Key Manager for the Datacenter to protect information in the event it becomes compromised through unauthorized access or disk removal, and to ensure compliance with internal, private, and government standards.

New virtualization-aware Navisphere Manager, a feature available to all CLARiiON CX4 customers with FLARE 29, enables Storage and VMware Administrators to reduce infrastructure reporting time from hours to minutes

With virtualization-aware Navisphere Manager, CLARiiON CX4 is now the industry’s only storage platform to provide:

·         Automated discovery and simple reporting on VMs

·         End-to-end mapping between physical and virtual servers, I/O paths, and LUNs on CLARiiON CX4 storage

·         Real-time dynamic view of VMware environments through integration with VMware vCenter Server

·         Simple search capability enabling Administrators to quickly identify VMs and their associated server and storage resources

The combination of this powerful new CLARiiON capability and the recently introduced EMC Storage Viewer plug-in for VMware vCenter provides CLARiiON users and VMware Administrators with a common view of their virtual infrastructures. The visibility that they now have into the environment enables them to quickly identify and address issues and conduct capacity planning very efficiently.

At eGroup we had a LABMANAGER virtual machine with a 40GB vmdk hard drive – Fully allocated! (Thanks to Jason for this)

However, only 6.5GB was in use – 84% free space – but hogging up a full 40GB on the production vmfs datastore! (Thanks to Jason for this)

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