Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) 7.4 is here

We have just released the 7.4 version of our vCenter plugin, aka, the VSI plugin, this plugin contains some new and highly requested functionality by many of you, our customers and partners.

XtremIO Native Replication / SRA

VSI can now show you all the available point in time (Pit) per a CG AND can instruct VMware SRM to failover / test failover to a specific pit, this is huge! Why? Because VMWare SRM only allow you to failover to the last point in time which may be problematic in cases of logical data corruption, think a virus / malware outbreak, no matter how many points in time you have, you can only failover to the last one..with this release you can simply point it to a specific pit and viola! , please note that it will also require a new version of our SRM SRA which will be out soon.

You can view a demo I created which shows how to deploy it and how to use it with an XtremIO array

DRR (Data Reduction) per Volume

I can’t even begin to tell you how many email I get about this one..so what is it?

By default, vCenter doesn’t have any awareness to array side capacity information, this was all good in the old days where dedupe / compression where rare at the array backend but these days, thin provisioning, deduplication and compression are a must for any all-flash array out there, add to this the complexity of allowing to have thin provisioning at the vSphere level and you got yourself a nice “I have no idea how much capacity is really consumed by a given datastore”, this day is over, yes, you could already view some info from the backend using the array UI (XMS) but in many cases, the vSphere administrator doesn’t have access to it so now you can view this info using the VSI plugin, this require XIOS 6.1 which has been out for month now..

It’s been a while since I recorded a VSI demo and I got many requests to show how to deploy it etc so below you can see a demo I recorded which shows you how to do it all!

As always, you can download the new plugin from support.emc.com or by clicking the screenshot below