The new VSI plugin from EMC allow VMware administrator to self service, manage and provide transparency and visibility about the back end SAN storage in the vSphere infrastructure. This had transformed the traditional way how the VMware administrator manage and operate the virtual infrastructure in the past. All of us may agreed that the SAN configuration details are not visible to us previously due to lack of visibility in the management console. If you would like to verify something on the SAN, you may require assistant from the SAN admin, due to restricted access to the SAN box. Now with the new VSI plug-in, it will able to provide the necessary configuration information to the VMware administrator without having to engage the SAN admin to verify some minor information. The VSI plugin support all platform for EMC product range include Clariion, Celerra and Symmetrix.


Here show the plug-in which integrated the the vi-client directly

The plug-in support all the EMC SAN product range from Clariion, Celerra to Symmetrix

Beside this, there are also the configuration wizard allow you to provision the datastore from the default storage pool which had been pre-assign from the SAN. The automation wizard will simplify the Datastore provisioning to the administrator. You will no longer require to rescan all HBA for every single host as the wizard will help you to do so during the provisioning process. 1 of the big improvement are the NFS datastore. Without the provision wizard, you may require log on to multiple console to export the NFS path and mount it to every single host 1 by 1, unless you do it with scripting method previously. You will no longer require to repeat the tire process of doing this as the automated wizard will help you to mount the NFS datastore to the cluster group automatically on the ESX host level.

Here is the NFS provision wizard. This is really helpful to simplify the process of NFS datastore provision on the ESX host.

The EMC plug-in is really helpful and I believe many of us will include this in our deployment in the future.