Hitachi Storage Adapters & Plugins: Product Overview

In my last post (HERE) I gave an overview of the plugins available within the Hitachi VMware Portfolio. I can tell you there is an imperative to create compelling feature-sets that add value for customers i.e. not just adapters for the sake of them.

In this post I take a slightly deeper look at adapter structure and delivery models for Management and Orchestration.

Regarding the delivery method and product structures, this is also something that is being improving all the time, to harmonise and consolidate bundling of binaries that would have been delivered separately in the past.

An example is the deployment of the latest incarnation of the VASA Provider (VP) which is now managed from a binary compatibility perspective as a single unit for NAS and Block storage. This means the VP is delivered for both platforms together and version management, binary compatibility and user experience involves a single vessel with the same management interface across File and Block.

This is perfect to underpin a policy-based management framework to ensure a VVol goes to any backend platform regardless of whether it’s NAS or Block Storage based on rule matching in vCenter.

Operations Management

For vCOps and vROps there is a single payload to cover each platform with documentation and binaries included inside. The version of the adapters is clearly labelled, in this case 1.3.1 so it’s very easy to distinguish between different downloads without having to check build numbers and interoperability guides!

Screen Shot 2016-02-16 at 16.51.51.pngYou’ll see the version above includes the binaries for both vCenter Operations Manager v5.8.x as well as vRealize Operations Manager v6.x.

All dashboards and metrics are also included inside this single deliverable for each product as well as all relevant documentation:

Screen Shot 2016-02-16 at 16.54.16.png

This makes it pretty easy to update your lab, production environment or whatever it might be. Also I’m glad to say that the VMware documentation definitely has been crafted in native English unlike some of the storage documents years ago so is easy to read and easy to use.

For integration with vSphere Operations management (vCOps and vROps) you need the following components (check first)

  • Hitachi Command Suite
  • Hitachi Tuning Manager
  • vCOps or vROps themselves

With vCOps 5.8.x you also need the requisite licenses/entitlement for custom dashboards (vCOps/vROps Advanced or Enterprise) to use the really nice dashboards developed by engineering. I will show you some of these in later blogs when we dive into what is provided.

Hitachi Tuning Manager (HTnM) is an incredibly powerful tool for diving deep into performance. Personally I believe using the native vSphere tools provides more tactical, virtual-centric information.

There are a number of really cool dashboards and super-metrics which we will dive into later. Obviously you can customise these and create Application-specific dashboards if you need to. This should always be the goal.

Here are some of the default dashboards provided for vCOps and vROps.

Screen Shot 2016-02-16 at 21.09.04.png

Unified Compute Platform Dashboards

For vROps and vCOps HDS publishes a single management pack for Hitachi Unified Compute Platform. UCP is Hitachi converged platform and UCP Director is the software that lives inside vCenter and manages the entire stack: Compute, Storage and Network as a single entity.

Unified Compute Platform for sure is the leading converged platform in the industry supporting vSphere and HyperV with a common set of APIs for Physical and Virtual Orchestration. You could also run bare metal and logical partitions, and we support Kubernetes on UCP too.

My colleague Valentin Hamburger recently conducted a vBrownbag session at Cisco Live Europe (CLEUR) talking about orchestrating applications, virtual and physical infrastructure using Puppet on this platform. Watch it here HERE!! 

For management of the full stack you only deploy a single management pack to get visibility of the different layers. The UCP Director software orchestrates and monitors all elements so the pack taps into existing Server, Storage and Networking metrics using the UCP Director API.

You get heatmaps across the virtual and physical infrastructure. When I get this hooked up in my lab I’ll do a deep dive in a later blog. Pretty simple stuff when you only have to talk to one API !

Orchestration

With vRO and vCO a large set of workflows have been exposed. Here I have a screenshot from a slightly older set of the adapters with the same payload as the vCOps/vROps management pack:

These are for Hitachi Servers and Storage.

Screen Shot 2016-02-16 at 18.02.37.png

You get Plugins for vCO and vRO inside the same bundle, so regardless of your versions you get all the latest workflows for BOTH versions when you download the latest plugins.

Pretty simple !.

The operations supported within the adapters today are:

  • Storage
    • Block
      • iSCSI Target
      • Provisioning
      • Shadowimage
      • Snapshot Backup (including VVol Operations)
      • Storage Configuration
      • TrueCopy Replication
    • File/NAS
      • Provisioning
      • Snapshot Backup
      • Storage Configuration
      • V2I Backup Group (Including Virtual Infrastructure Integrator) virtual machine backup operations
      • Virtual Machine workflows
      • Storage subsystem and high-profile workflows

You can get a full list of existing workflows in this spreadsheet. There are over 120 Server and Storage workflows across File and Block storage that you can leverage. A lot of our customers are starting to do this today.

 

 

 

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Hitachi Storage Adapters & Plugins: Product Overview

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