EMC ESI with Microsoft Applications

EMCs ESI, it's FREE!!!!

A few weeks back I recorded a series of short videos that showcase the ease of which you can extend your applications direct from EMCs FREE Storage Integration Suite (ESI). These are short sub 90 second videos that each focus on only one particular feature provided through the ESI console.  As part of our application stack value prop this is a great example of what EMC can provide for a customer and of course, it is FREE!

ESI is like EMCs glue into the Microsoft ecosystem and includes:

• Simple user console for storage, replication and application management
• Support for Windows, HyperV, vSphere and XenServer
• Powershell library with almost 200 cmdlets
• System Center Orchestrator Integration Pack
• System Center Operations Manager Management Pack
• Hyper-V VSS Provider and associated PowerShell library
• Support for Exchange (up to 2013) including Native and Third party replication (enabled by RecoverPoint)
• Support for Sharepoint and SQL Server (SQL AlwaysOn and FC coming in a few weeks)

Storage Provisioning with ESI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9effRPY7uLU

Microsoft Exchange Discovery with ESI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CveZDDBf6pE

Microsoft Exchange Database Provisioning with ESI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVdOA7LsZw0

Microsoft Exchange Database Replication with ESI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vy3uNlAbsc

Microsoft SharePoint Content Provisioning with ESI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_22OiKxsV_Y

You can download it from http://www.emc.com/data-center-management/storage-integrator-for-windows-suite.htm

EMC and Microsoft Applications Working Together

EMC Storage Integration Suite

I recently recorded a number of demo videos showing off some of the cool capabilities of the EMCs ESI. These videos show simple storage provisioning activities but aligned to applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint.

ESI is a very cool tool that is available from EMC for FREE (yes you read that correctly) and provides a rich set of capabilities including:

• Simple user console for storage, replication and application management
• Support for Windows, HyperV, vSphere and XenServer
• Powershell library with almost 200 cmdlets
• System Center Orchestrator Integration Pack
• System Center Operations Manager Management Pack
• Hyper-V VSS Provider and associated PowerShell library
• Support for Exchange (up to 2013) including Native and Third party replication (enabled by RecoverPoint)
• Support for Sharepoint and SQL Server

Demos:

Storage provisioning with EMCs Storage Integration Suite

EMC Storage Integration with Exchange using ESI

Exchange Database Provisioning with EMCs ESI

Exchange Database Replication Enabled with EMCs ESI

SharePoint Content Database Provisioning with EMCs ESI

Product Page:
http://www.emc.com/data-center-management/storage-integrator-for-windows-suite.htm

SCVMM 2012R2 Powershell Cmdlet Changes

Damn, SCVMM Not Supported

Funny, but sometimes changes occur with very little warning and SCVMM 2012R2 has had some that I keep tripping over. Within the fantastic EMC Solution Center in Sydney, Australia which I am fortunate to have a great collection of toys (oops, I meant IT equipment) to play with (again... I meant to say develop and test against) I have come across this issue a few times but find it very difficult to dig up information related back to it.

It relates to the extensive and must say, fantastic set of PowerShell cmdlets that come with System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Firstly the initial changes were very obvious, 2008->2012 the cmdlets started to prefix the command with 'SC', An example of this is that Get-VMMServer became Get-SCVMMServer.

This in itself makes absolute sense, you need a unique identifier when your environment could have multiple libraries that may provide the same cmdlet such as happens with a cmdlet like Get-VM which is supported by vSphere, SCVMM and Hyper-V Powershell libraries so no problem there. What did happen though is Microsoft, I assume to soften the impact, did support the old cmdlets via aliases. These aliases were retired with the release for 2012R2 which I also fully understand as you need to move on eventually, so whats the problem?

The issue is that not everyone has moved onto the cmdlets even though they have had a good chunk of time. My guess this may be because they didn't need to change so why bother, until now. Anyway I have been caught out with this issue with products from both Microsoft (e.g. Team Found Server's Lab Center) and VMware (vCloud Automation Center).

So if you find something is not supporting SCVMM 2012R2 but did 2012SP1, this is not a bad place to start looking at when trying to determine why.