I guess I found it, nas5648701.exe which came with the USB stick with the emcnas5.6.48.7.iso.

What's the procedure to install this exe, is that also in the celerra procedure generator.

Tried to install it and upgraded the DM.

server_version server_2
server_2 : Product: EMC Celerra File Server  Version: T5.6.48.701

Thanx for your reply.

John

5.6.48.701 is a addon patch on top of 5.6.48 (basically just a nas.exe I think)

Its available through your regular EMC support channels

Rainer

Hi John,

does it work now ?

How do you like it ? want to share your first impressions ?

Rainer

Got it up and running and it's looking good.

Created two datastores, one with compression enabled, one disabled.

Cloned 1 running Ubuntu VM from an existing datastore, took about 10 minutes per datastore.

Then created 5 full clones from the compressed VM via the Celerra interface, took about 4 minutes per VM:

Didn't wait for the dedupe scan and compressed the five images:

[nasadmin@ns700-demoprod-cs /]$ nas_fs  -size vmware_NFS0
total = 39862 avail = 37744 used = 2117 ( 5% ) (sizes in MB) (  blockcount = 82903040 )
volume: total = 40480 (sizes in MB) ( blockcount = 82903040 )

[nasadmin@ns700-demoprod-cs /]$  fs_dedupe -info id=308
Id                                 = 308
Name                               = vmware_NFS0
Deduplication                      = On
Status                             = Idle
As of the last file system scan (Tue Apr  6 12:53:33 CEST 2010):
    Files scanned                   = 36
    Files deduped                   = 6 (17% of total files)
    File system capacity            = 39861 MB
    Original data size              = 22922 MB (58% of current file  system capacity)
    Space saved                     = 20805 MB (91% of original data  size)

Then also cloned 5 VM's on the none compressed Datastore:

[nasadmin@ns700-demoprod-cs /]$ nas_fs -size vmware_NFS1
total = 39862 avail = 16065 used = 23797 ( 60% ) (sizes in MB) ( blockcount = 82903040 )
volume: total = 40480 (sizes in MB) ( blockcount = 82903040 )

[nasadmin@ns700-demoprod-cs /]$ fs_dedupe -info id=309
Id                                 = 309
Name                               = vmware_NFS1
Deduplication                      = Off

Saved around 20GB between the two filesystems, going to migrate our virtualized router vm images from our lab environement to a compressed volume to save some space from my Clariion environment.

Regards,

John Grinwis

Anyone else already trying to use this Celerra Plugin?

Had a couple of issues where a compressed job was hanging and we had to reboot VC to get rid of some old jobs.

Using this now, everything seems to be working, except for the following:

When I provision storage, if I select the "Virtual Provisioning" option, no matter what I put into the "Max. Capacity" field, I can't then select "OK".  I've tried the "Advanced button" but that didn't help.  The only time it works is if I remove the "Virtual provisioning" option, then I can create NFS Exports.

• I'm using 5.6.48.701 on an NS-120.
• Vsphere Client 4 Build 208111
• VCenter 4 Build 208111
• EMC Celerra Plug-in for VMware 1.0.7 Enabled

Apart from that, everyone I've shown has been blown away.

Faisal,

are you going to let your VMware group provision their own storage ? I want my VMware team to have as much visibility into storage as possible but giving them the ability to provision on their own kind of scares me.

Dynamox, I don't have any users  of my own as I work for a distributer,  but I'm at client sites  implementing alot.  In my opinion,  yup, I'd let the Vmware team provision the storage (if it's a separate team to the storage team). Most of the sites I'm going to,they're the same person though.  I'd have created a Pool of storage for them anyway specifically for that purpose, and as long as it's not big databases then I think it would be fine.  So files, file servers etc.  All they'd have to do is pick the pool of storage and provision some storage (filesystem - export - datastore - all created in the background which I think is pretty cool).

If they want to start putting virtual machines or databases in those datastores,  then I think it gets a little trickier, and I think the SAN team would or should get involved there.  But honestly most of the  environments I'm in, I put all this effort into architecting their  spindle counts for their applications,  only to find that when I go back in a year later, the customer's been "shoe horning" in as many applications and virtual machines as they can,  and then start having performance issues.

I suppose if you're worried, you could just get them to just use the "Existing NFS Exports" options, so at least the SAN person created the important bits in the SAN, so (Spindles, Pools- filesystem - export).

It's a pitty you can't set levels of security on this plug-In (interface) so that you could just get an administrator to see or use the parts of the Plug-in you want to allow him to use.  I don't suppose you could use the VMware permissions to do that, could you ?

Increasing the size of a datastore (NFS) is really useful, seen lots of places where they've increased the size of a LUN in the array (Block) but don't fully understand how to do that within the operating system, or what the associated implications are (depending on the OS). Using NFS it's so much easier so yup, I'd let them do that.  I'd get alerts anyway if things start to fill up.

I think Flash is going to make a huge difference when companies start to buy more of these (and the prices decrease even more), as I won't have to worry so much about allocating so many spindles for databases.

That compression option is pretty cool

I really like the whole thing so far.  I'm just about to implement VMware View using my Celerra, so that'll give me a chance to see how this all ties together.

By the way....are you getting that problem with the "Provision" button...or is this just me ?