Dell equallogic group manager download software#
Dell equallogic group manager download windows#

After implementing it, I was reminded that it was indeed a 1.0 product. I had visions of this post focusing on the performance tweaks and the unique abilities of the HIT/LE. There are some downfalls (Samba not supporting SMB2), but for the most part, it falls in the вЂњgood enoughвЂќ category. Right now, using VMвЂ™s to present storage data is the solution that fits within my budget.

The FS7500 turns the EqualLogic block based storage accessible only on your SAN network into CIFS/NFS storage presentable to your LAN.

Dell equallogic group manager download windows#

I knew from my experience with working with guest attached volumes for Windows VMвЂ™s, that they were very agile, and offered a tremendous amount of flexibility.Д«ut waitвЂ¦ you might be asking, вЂњIf IвЂ™m doing nothing but presenting large amounts of raw storage, why not skip all of this and use DellвЂ™s new EqualLogic FS7500 Multi-Protocol NAS solution?вЂќ Great question! I had the opportunity to see the FS7500 NAS head unit at this yearвЂ™s Dell Storage Forum. Guest attached volumes align well with the вЂњdesign as if you know itвЂ™s going to changeвЂќ concept. If you are ever contemplating deployment decisions, remember that simplicity and flexibility of management should trump simplicity of deployment if itвЂ™s a close call. It would have been simple enough to deploy a typical VM with a second large VMDK, but managing such an arrangement would be more difficult. In fact, this was just the first of several large pools of storage that I need to serve up.

Dell equallogic group manager download software#

I had to serve up a large amount (several Terabytes) of flat file storage for our Software Development Team. I wasnвЂ™t trying out the HIT/LE because I ran out of things to do. I understand the reason for thinking this way, but my experience with them have proven quite the contrary. Others might contend that because the volumes arenвЂ™t seen by vCenter, one is making things more complex, not less. If you use these commercial applications for protection, you may want to determine if guest attached volumes are a good fit, and if so, find alternate ways of protecting the volumes.

The one вЂњgotchaвЂќ about guest attached volumes is that they arenвЂ™t visible by the vCenter API, so commercial backup applications that rely on the visibility of these volumes via vCenter wonвЂ™t be able to back them up.

With a native volume, you would be able to use the entire 2TB of space. If you wanted to serve up a 2TB volume of storage using a VMDK, more than likely youвЂ™d have a 2TB VMFS volume, and something like a 1.6TB VMDK file to accommodate hypervisor snapshots. With guest attached volumes, itвЂ™s easy to crank up the frequency of snapshot and replica protection on just the data, without interfering with the VM that is serving up the data. Thanks to the independent volume(s), one can easily see with SANHQ what the requirements of that data volume is. My вЂњin the trenchesвЂќ experience with the guest attached volumes in VMвЂ™s running Microsoft OSвЂ™s (and EqualLogicвЂ™s HIT/ME) have proven that recovering data off of guest attached volumes is just easier вЂ“ whether you recover it from snapshot or replica, clone it for analysis, etc. Having the data as guest attached means that you can easily prepare a new VM presenting the data (via NFS, Samba, etc.), and cut it over without anyone knowing вЂ“ especially when you are using DNS aliasing. Often times, systems serving up large volumes of unstructured data are hard to update. The VM can easily fit in your standard VMFS volumes.

It keeps the footprint of the VM really small.

WhatвЂ™s the big deal about guest attached volumes? Well, here is why I like them. The HIT/ME and HIT/LE offer unique features when using guest attached volumes in your VMвЂ™s. IвЂ™ve been a big fan of Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for Microsoft (HIT/ME), so I was looking forward to seeing how the newly released HIT for Linux (HIT/LE) was going to pan out.