by John Dias, Storage Architect, Dell Compellent — September 13, 2010
Editor's Note: This blog was originally posted by John Dias, storage architect at Compellent on his Storage Gumbo blog.
Thanks to Darin Schmitz, Virtualization Product Specialist at Compellent, I'm able to share with you some screen captures of the vSphere plug-in previewed by Compellent at VMworld. The finished product will be released Q4 but I've never been good at waiting to open my presents (yes, I was a little brat and would frequently search for my birthday and Christmas gifts—good thing I have a talent for acting surprised).
And what a treat this is! In my previous post I covered how storage administration is made much easier through Enterprise Manager using the Windows and VMware provisioning capabilities to not only carve out volumes but to fully present them for use on the host.
With this plug-in you'll be able to do that and much more for vSphere ESX servers including creating, expanding and deleting storage as well as managing replays and performing data recovery from the vSphere client. The list of features in the final version may differ slightly but in general administrators can save a great deal of time and simplify tasks by using the new plug-in.
A few screen caps are provided below to tease you—enjoy! Click on the images below for a full view of the screen shots.
The context menu shows options available for managing your data stores and the underlying Compellent volumes. Note that Data Instant Replay (Compellent snapshots) features are available to the vSphere administrator including "Recover VM Data From Replay...."
The storage configuration wizard should be familiar to any Compellent SAN administrator. As you can see below in the summary prior to volume creation the properties for both the Compellent volume and the VMFS datastore have been configured for end-to-end provisioning.
Clicking the "Finish" button will begin the provisioning process and when completed you'll have a new datastore ready for use by guests. No extra steps required. Expansion and removal of datastores is just as easy.
Selecting "Recover VM Data from Replay..." from the context menu launches a wizard which shows you all the replays available for a given datastore, including information like creation time, expiry, size and replay description.
The replay recovery summary screen lists the properties for the recovery including host(s) to which the replay view will be mapped, the desired datastore name and LUN ID which are all configurable during the wizard steps. This screen cap was taken after the "Finish" button was clicked and shows the status of the background tasks. Note that Compellent administrators have this ability today, but it involves going back and forth between the Compellent management and vSphere client interfaces—it can get confusing. This is one feature I really hope that makes the final cut.
Again, this is really a teaser and hopefully we'll be able to show more very soon.