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Posts Tagged ‘EMC’

I am finishing up an installation of an EMC Clariion CX4 SAN. One of the final steps of the installation is to configure PowerPath/VE on the ESXi hosts. PowerPath/VE is EMC’s multipathing extension module for VMware (and Hyper-V), designed to replace the Native Multipathing Plugin (NMP) for increased I/O performance and failover management.  To simplify and automate the installation of PowerPath/VE, I decided to use VMware Update Manager (VUM) to push the extension to the ESXi 4.x hosts in the environment.

The process of setting up an additional VUM patch repository to host PowerPath/VE (and other 3rd party extensions such as the Cisco Nexus 1000v) is pretty straight forward.  3rd party extensions are supported in VUM beginning with vSphere 4.0 Update 1.  Chad Sakac has posted a great video guide on YouTube that covers the setup:

I opted to use the tomcat installation on the environment’s vCenter server to host the PowerPath/VE repository.  To accomplish this, I simply created a new directory in the tomcat root directory.  The default path for the root directory on a vSphere vCenter Server is “C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps” (or C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps on a 64-bit installation).

I created a directory named ‘depot’ and within that directory created a PowerPathVE folder.  I extracted the contents of the VUM folder from the PowerPath .zip file that I downloaded from http://powerlink.emc.com.  A screenshot of the directory is below:

PowerPath/VE Depot Directory Tree

After creating the directory for the patch repository, I simply added an Extension Repository to VMware Update Manager as Chad shows in his video.  I would like to call out one caveat – Because vCenter may not listen on standard HTTP/HTTPS ports, I used https://vcenter.domain.local:8443/depot/PowerPathVE/index.xml as the path to the source.

VUM Patch Source

Once PowerPath was added to an Extension Baseline in VUM, I simply had to scan my hosts for updates and remediate.  Installation of PowerPath/VE requires the host to be in Maintenance Mode and concludes with a reboot.  Pretty simple.

Then all you have to do is fight through an overly-complex licensing setup (seriously, a 112 page PDF on how to install licenses???), a bit of configuration, and you are multi-pathing with the best of them.  If you are interested in learning more about PowerPath/VE, start with this whitepaper: EMC PowerPath/VE for VMware vSphere Best Practices Planning.  For a bit of real-world insight into the performance increase you might see with PowerPath/VE, check out this blog post from Eric Sloof: Massive I/O power increase using EMC PowerPath/VE.

We all know that virtualization allows us to do more with less.  Fewer servers and space-saving storage (talk about an oxymoron) help us put some green in the datacenter and back in the budget.  But with tight budgets demanding greater efficiency, virtualization pushing per-U-space utilization higher, and increasingly rack-dense equipment, proper planning of your physical plant remains an essential part of IT.  I argue that right-sizing your power, cooling, and floor-space is more critical now than it has ever been, and is a knowing how to do it is a darn good skill for a virtualization engineer to possess.

So along those lines… I was just doing some site-prep work for a new Clariion installation and noticed that the EMC Power Calculator has been updated.  It is now a pretty slick little web app that can be found on the PowerLink site (login required) here: https://powerlink.emc.com/nsepn/webapps/powercalculator/Main.aspx.

While I am at it, here are some links to other power consumption calculators.  Let me know if you have others and I will update this post:

• Dell: http://www.dell.com/calc
• IBM: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/resources/powerconfig/index.html
• NetApp: Storage Efficiency Calculator here - http://www.secalc.com – it doesn’t calculate your consumption, just what you might save over a competitor’s offering.
• HP: http://h30099.www3.hp.com/configurator/powercalcs.asp
• Sun: http://www.sun.com/solutions/eco_innovation/powercalculators.jsp
• Hitachi/HDS: http://www.byhitachi.com/se/go/weight-and-power-calculator/
• APC: http://www.apc.com/prod_docs/results.cfm?DocType=Trade-Off%20Tool&Query_Type=10 and http://www.apcc.com/products/runtime_for_extendedruntime.cfm?upsfamily=165
• Emerson: Efficiency Calculator: http://www.emerson.com/edc/Calculator/default.aspx
• VMware ROI Calculator: http://vmware.com/go/calculator
• This site has a bunch of links to other calculators and resources: http://thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com/calculator.html

There’s some fun and timely chatter happening right now on Twitter around power consumption and sizing – join in by following me at http://twitter.com/joshuatownsend/!