Why EMC for VMware

Alan Renouf is a community peer for VMware PowerCLI, Virtu-Al.Net.  In 2009, he was named a vEXPERT by VMware.  Alan's main focus is to teach and help other VMware admins automate their VMware infrastructures and make their lives easier through automation.
www.virtu-al.net.

Recently at the London VMware User Group I gave an additional presentation on top of the normal PowerCLI session I normally provide (which was interactive this time and I think worked very well).

The subject of this session was “Why EMC for VMware”, I have had a number of questions from people who know that I have joined EMC and I wanted to address these and show exactly what EMC is doing when it comes to VMware, one thing I didn’t know about EMC before joining them was how tight they actually integrate both their software and hardware product ranges into VMware and vCenter, making both the life of the virtual admin and the storage admin (I know most of us are now both) 100 times better.

During the presentation Simon Seagrave (fellow vSpecialist and blogger) and I gave an overview of some of the EMC products and how they can make your life easier, just one good example of this is using the EMC Plugins for vCenter – strangely out of 2/3 of the room who said they were EMC customers only a few had tried these.

Using these plugins can make both the VMware admin and Storage admin start communicating together and understanding each others language – think of the universal communicator they use in StarTrek, now when the storage admin is talking to the VMware admin about LUNs and RAID levels, what used to be a glazed look will instantly be translated into datastores and performance !

Check out the below slides or Chad’s great post explaining the plugins in detail which can be found here.

 Also the much requested PDF can be downloaded by clicking on the image below:

Another great area of upcoming integration described at the VMUG was VAAI, this is a great new feature of 4.1 and in my opinion the way things should be done, no longer is VMware trying to perform the complex storage related tasks but they are passing these off to the array, which knows how to do these tasks multiple times faster than the ESX host and will also allow the CPU cycles and memory that would have been used by the host to be freed up and used for more important things like running VMs.

Again for more detail make sure you check out the below slide deck and yet another of Chad’s great posts here.

As the people at the VMUG know, not only did we overrun but we also rushed through many of these slides and I had to cut these down, far too much cool information to share and not enough time !  I didn’t even get a chance to mention the RSA products and the amazing work they are doing !

Why EMC London VMUG.pdf