VMware Dead Space Reclamation (UNMAP) and Pure Storage

One of the main things I have been doing in my first few weeks at Pure Storage (which has been nothing but awesome so far by the way) is going through all of our VMware best practices and integration points. Testing them, seeing how they work or can they be improved etc. The latest thing I looked into was Dead Space Reclamation (which from here on out I will just refer to as UNMAP) with the Pure Storage FlashArray and specifically ESXi 5.5. This is a pretty straight forward process but I did find something interesting that is worth noting.

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Firewall requirements for EMC VSI 6.1 for vSphere Web Client

As you might have read on my blog a few days ago, EMC released an updated version of the Virtual Storage Integrator tool for vSphere Web Client that supports direct provisioning and some management of VNX and VMAX storage. The previous version supported ViPR-only provisioning. If you didn’t see that post you can check it out here. Inevitably when a product involves cross-application and importantly cross-server integration many customers ask the question about what are the firewall requirements to get this thing to work? Let’s take a look.

vsi_firewall

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Virtual Storage Integrator for vSphere Web Client

Today the long-awaited update to Virtual Storage Integrator for the vSphere Web Client as been released! Six months or so ago EMC released the first iteration of the VSI Web Client (version 6.0) that supported provisioning of storage but only for environments enabled with ViPR. The latest release (version 6.1) now adds support for direct provisioning of storage from a VMAX or VNX array.

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