Unisphere for PowerMax – VMware integration

 VMware integration has been part of Unisphere in one way or another since it was called Symmetrix Management Console. In its more recent form it consisted of showing information about ESXi hosts, their VMs, and their storage. It even had the ability to allow the administrator to add RDMs to individual VMs. Unfortunately it had a couple of big drawbacks. Firstly, you could only add ESXi hosts and not vCenters. As most customers use large clusters of ESXi hosts in their vCenters, adding them individually was a non-starter. Secondly, in order to add an ESXi host you were required to use the root user, which many VMware admins were reticent to divulge. All in all then, it was a feature I saw used infrequently at best.

Year after year I pushed for development to change the integration and at the very least offer users the chance to add vCenters in addition to ESXi hosts. The perseverance finally paid off and you can now add at the vCenter level and Unisphere will automatically bring in your ESXi hosts.

When you do add at the vCenter level, Unisphere will only add ESXi hosts in that vCenter that have storage presented from the array. This can be very useful if you run multiple clusters in a single vCenter, each which sees different storage. The same holds true if you try to individually add an ESXi host. It will fail if the host does not see the array storage.

The new integration also solves the second issue I mentioned, the root user. We now only require a read-only user when adding an ESXi host or vCenter since the integration is only read-only (no longer can you add RDMs to VMs).

When you drill-down into an ESXi host there are 4 tabs: Details (general info about ESXi host), Masking Views (pathing details), Virtual Machines (all VMs and details), and Performance (useful for noisy neighbors). In the virtual machine view you can select an individual VM and then obtain detail about its disks. The integration supports all VMware storage types – NFS, VMFS, RDMs, and VVols. In the example below I am showing a VVol VM and drilling down to one of the individual VVol devices. As we do not have this type of end-to-end integration within vCenter, this capability in Unisphere is a welcome addition to our VVol implementation.

Finally, I created a quick demo running through the various screens to offer a general overview of the feature.

Remember that you do not need to own a PowerMax array to use Unisphere for PowerMax. It supports all our VMAX platforms which allows you to take advantage of the new VMware integration whether you own a VMAX-1SE or a VMAX All Flash.