EMC VSI 6.4 Web Client Plugin and the VNXe3200

EMC has released version 6.4 of the Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) plugin for the vSphere Web Client. This release fixed an issue with registering a VNXe3200 as a storage system.

What is the VSI? Here is the description from the EMC download site: Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) 6.4 is an EMC plug-in for the vSphere Web Client. VSI 6.4 allows the VMware administrator to provision, monitor, manage, and protect datastores on EMC storage directly from vCenter, simplifying management of the virtualized environment. VSI 6.4 supports AppSync, ViPR, VMAX, VNX, VNXe3200, and XtremIO.

The VSI is a packaged in a virtual appliance and the OVA can be downloaded from here: https://support.emc.com/products/34010_VSI-for-VMware-vSphere-Web-Client (VSI is free but an EMC account is required to download).

This post provides an overview of deploying and configuring the VSI appliance and provisioning a VMFS datastore using the plugin.

The OVA deployment is simple and similar to any other OVA or OVF deployment.  As part of the deployment the wizard prompts you for the network configuration information for the VSI appliance.  You can specify the Default Gateway, DNS server, IP Address, and Subnet or leave these blank to use DHCP.

The OVA deploys the VSI appliance configured with 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM, which seems a little excessive. I have not messed with adjusting this yet but as far as utilization goes it is consuming almost no host CPU resources and only 2 GB of host memory resources, so this can likely be adjusted without issue.

Once the appliance has been deployed and powered on you can access the administration at https://FQDN or IP Address of VSI appliance:8443/vsi_usm/ The username is admin and the default password is ChangeMe.  On first log on the default password must be changed.  Once logged into the Administration interface the plugin is registered wit the vCenter server.

After registering with vCenter the plugin will show in Client Plug-Ins list.

Administration is done from the vCenter. If the plugin has been successfully registered a new menu will be available as part of the vCenter Home configuration in the vSphere Web Client as shown below.

Here you can register the Solution Integration service and the Storage System. For the VNXe3200, you select the VNXe 3200 and provide an administrator username and password.

After successfully registering the storage system you can then provision storage on the VNXe from the vSphere Web Client from the EMC Plugins Action menu.

When you select the New EMC Datastore a wizard launches that walks you through the process. You select the array where the volume will be provisioned, the VMFS version, size, datastore name, etc.

A new LUN is created on the VNXe3200, formatted VMFS, and presented to the selected hosts. The process can be monitored in the Recent Tasks or in the Tasks Console.

Once completed the VMFS datastore will be available. Nice!