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1884
March 8th, 2012 08:00
Configuring VSI plugin to work in a large environment
All, I want to use the VSI plugin but I think I am going to have issues. The VMware environment spans several physical locations with one vCenter instance. I am thinking I will need a Solutions Enabler installation at each site but it appears the plugin will work with only one Solutions Enabler instance.
I can think of a couple of possible ways to workaround this:
1. Install the plugin and vcenter at every location (not going to happen).
2. Present the gatekeepers at each site back to the Solutions enabler box over the WAN via FCOE (the storage guys laughed pretty hard, not going to happen either).
Is there another way?
Is this feature on the VSI roadmap?
How would I make a feature request?
Thanks,
Keith
kendcollins
40 Posts
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March 8th, 2012 09:00
Hi Keith,
You install the VSI, and associated libraries such as SE, on the client where you run vSphere client. You don't need to install on the vCenter server itself. The workstation/server where you are running the vSphere client does need to be able to reach/connect w/ the vCenter server.
You should be able to install VSI in multiple locations with no issues. The caveats are that the client must be able to reach/connect with the vCenter server and the storage array.
Let me know if you have further questions.
Ken
keith_hardy
3 Posts
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March 8th, 2012 10:00
OK, so I could install the VMware client on the SE VM that I have in every datacenter and instruct the staff to use that box to connect to the central vCenter server?
Ideally I would like to have the plugin be able to talk to multiple SE machines but I'll research the solution you suggested to see if its appropriate for us.
Thank You,
Keith
LeeMC2
25 Posts
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March 9th, 2012 04:00
Hi Keith,
I think that I understand your problem, but let me verify it with you first.
You have multiple physical datacenters, separated by some distance.
You have one or more Symmetrix arrays at each of those datacenters.
You have a single instance of VMware vCenter managing ESX servers in each of those datacenters.
If all of that is correct, the you will unfortunately need to use a separate Solutions Enabler server in each datacenter. This is because the Symmetrix can only be discovered in-band, and not over the network (had this been a CX or VNX array then the answer would have been different). And as you point out, VSI will only allow you to configure a single Solutions Enabler server.
So is there a single user (maybe yourself) who will need to resolve storage within all of the different datacenters? Or are there several users who will only need to resolve the storage in their datacenter? If the former, then you will unfortunately need to change your SE server each time you want to resolve storage in a different datacenter. If the latter, then each user can use their specific SE server.
We do have an existing feature request for multiple SE servers for this product. If this is something that you need (based on your answers to the above), then we'll certainly evaluate the possibility of implementing this.
keith_hardy
3 Posts
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March 9th, 2012 05:00
Your understanding of the situation is correct. I would like to follow up with the feature request. Is there a formal process for doing this?
Thanks for everyone's assistance!
christopher_ime
2K Posts
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March 9th, 2012 19:00
Keith,
Thank you for your feedback. Yes, you can submit a feature request via the "Product Enhancement Request Form" available on PowerLink via the following breadcrumb trail:
Home > Support > Request Support > Request a Product Enhancement > Terms and Conditions
Craig_Stewart
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37 Posts
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March 26th, 2012 01:00
I recently spoke to two Symmetrix customers about this same thing, they want to use the VSI Storage Viewer in the same way but had Symmetrix arrays spread over multiple data centres and ran into the same potential problems.
The solution put forward by KenDCollins has issues due to the fact that you would need to present in-band gatekeeper luns to the adminstrators client PC, I'm sure you can all see the potential issues in doing that.
What you could look at doing is deploying individual Solution Enabler per site and connecting them to the Symmetrix arrays in those sites. Then deploy the VSI plug-ins on the admins PC's and then configure the VSI to connect to the SE server in the site with the Symmetrix array you're looking to query. You would of course need to change the SE server if you wanted to query a Symmetrix in a different site but it is one potential way to work around the problem.
I did an article a while back on some of the considerations with VSI Storage Viewer and Symmetrix arrays which may provide some additional information.
http://www.virtualpro.co.uk/2011/09/26/emc-vsi-storage-viewer-solution-enabler-and-symmetrix-arrays/
I think it is imperative that you look to submit this as a product enhancement, if the guys in engineering don't know about the requirement / use case they can't code it to work for you. I'll be encouraging the guys I know to submit something similar as their use case was exactly the same as this one.