Itzikr's Blog

VMworld 2018 is taking place this week and amongst the many announcement, I want to also talk a little bit about something that will come out soon, our vCenter (Virtual Storage Integrator or ‘VSI’ in short) has been our premier plugin to manage your

Dell EMC storage arrays, Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) is a plug-in for VMware vCenter. It enables administrators to view, manage, and optimize storage for VMware ESX/ESXi servers and hosts, and then map that storage to the hosts.

VSI 8.0 consists of:

• A graphical user interface (VSI-Plugin)
  
• The Dell EMC Integration API which provides communication and access to the storage systems.
  
• It’s all new!
  
• VSI 8.0 supports the vSphere Client (HTML5) and is a total refresh of VSI
  
• SIS (Solutions Integration Service) has been replaced by IAPI (Integrations API)
  
  • Runs on Docker Container/Photon OS
    
  • Uses Redis/Cache
    
• VSI 8.0 Leverages vCenter Users/Groups
  
• Improved user experience
  

  VSI Administration
  

  • VSI Home Page (Monitoring the status of the VSI plugin storage including capacity)
    
  • Registering/Unregistering Dell EMC PowerMax/VMAX AFA, XtremIO, and Unity storage systems
    
  • Registering/Unregistering VMAX AFA/PowerMAX Storage Groups (including setting max usage), Unity Storage Pools, and Unity NAS Servers
    
  • Granting/Revoking Storage Access to VMAX AFA/PowerMax Storage Groups, Unity Storage Pools, Unity NAS Servers, and XtremIO storage systems
    
• Storage Management
  
  • Managing VMFS 6 datastores on PowerMax/VMAX, XtremIO, and Unity
    
  • Managing NFS 3 and 4.1 datastores on Unity
    
• Host Management
  

Managing Host Best Practices for XtremIO

Deploying VSI

One of the biggest changes we are making to VSI 8.X is ease of deployment which means that during it’s OVA deployment, you just need to give it some IP settings and the vCenter credentials and off you go, no need to login to the appliance via a special port and do it from there as well…yep, that’s a big request that came from you, our customers and partners so now, it’s a completely different ballgame where it comes to deployment.

Once the OVA has been deployed, you can check that the plugin is registered in vCenter, under ‘Menu’-> Dell EMC VSI

You can also verify the plugin status and version via the ‘Administration’ Tab -> ‘Client Plug-Ins’

• The Home page/Dashboard is where you view the health of your plugin.
  
• In this example you can see the status of the Integration services (IAPI), the number of registered vCenter Servers and Storage Systems, and the capacity of storage
  

• Click on vCenter Servers to display the vCenter servers registered to the VSI plugin. You can register and unregister vCenter servers in a linked mode group, as well as editing the IP address being used by the IAPI to connect to the vCenter server.
  

• The Storage Systems page displays the storage systems registered to VSI.
  
• You can register, unregister, and edit storage system registration from this page.
  
• Expand the storage system to view details and any storage pools, NAS servers, and storage groups
  

• The User/Groups page is where you manage a vCenter user’s or group’s access to Dell EMC Storage
  
• You can view, add and edit access to storage pools, NAS servers, storage groups, and XtremIO clusters.
  

• To register a storage system, click +. This opens the Register Storage System wizard.
  
• Select the storage system Type XtremIO and enter the required information.
  

Note that you must register an array using a user with admin privileges

• The XtremIO storage systems being managed by the XMS are discovered and available for registration.
  
• Select the XtremIO storage systems you want to register
  

Click Next

• To allow other vCenter users or groups to use the storage system for provisioning, you must grant them access.
  
• Select the users or groups to be granted access to the storage system.
  
• Click Next
  

• The storage systems you registered are now displayed in Storage Systems page.
  
• You can expand the Storage System to view storage system details and users granted access.
  

That’s it for now, as we get to the release date, I will publish another post showing all the features and how to work with them

P.S

I made a reference to the fact the VSI SIS has been replaced by IAPI (Integrations API), more on that later on..