My Nimble Wish List

[J Benway]

1. Integrate with Veeam backups. Veeam intergrates with HP and now NetApp, I know nimble is willing but veeam only seems to want to work with the established players

2. With Exchange running as a vm, do Exchange VSS snaps that clear the exchange logs.

3.VM centric backups and replication, not based on LUN/volume

4.Snap shot explorer to restore indivual files or emails without needing to mount to existing vm

Love my nimble storage,jb

[tmoore106]

I definitely agree with your list. Adding comments below.....

1. I think it will come with time....

2. Agreed!

3. Vvols (when it actually ships) I think changes that.....

4. UFS Explorer Standard Access Learn it, live it, love it

[stl_cardinals11125]

Would love some kind of Veeam partnership.

[julez66]

Nimble Storage supported powershell commandlets rather than community driven (I love the community, but wish it was supported by Nimble).

[BenLoveday]

Here's a few things I'd be keen to see:

- FC support - would be great to be able to swap out those ethernet NICs for some Fibre HBAs as an option, particularly having support for FC direct connect (e.g. direct FC to two hosts without fibre switches)

- Mutliple SNMP trap targets

- RBAC - I know this is coming, good stuff

- Syslog support

- NFS or CIFS support would be an added bonus

- Remote power on - e.g. lights out management port. We often have power outages at sites and would be nice to be able to power on array remotely without requiring a fat finger.

- Support for replication to a non-Nimble target, e.g. NFS share or a virtual appliance

- Dedupe - this would be a nice to have

- A smaller 2RU model using the 2.5" Supermicro SBB chassis

- Better third-party monitoring & management support e.g. SNMP/SMI-S

- Kinda off-topic but a VSA type product would be cool, to compete with VSAN and HP Storevirtual VSA :-)

- An NFR virtual appliance for training/simulation/homelabs

Man this list makes me look greedy! haha.

[marktheblue45]

I think dedupe is going to happen

[Nick_Dyer]

No comment...

[briffle52]

I like many of Ben's items.. I have 3 more:

- More SSH keys (or maybe that will be part of RBAC) but I snapshot from my oracle servers.. I have more than 10.. Sharing an ssh key is an ugly hack..

- Better replication management.. 

    -  Replication is usually awesome, but adding a new volume to replicate bogs everything down.  Let me do initial replication at a lower priority, and not using one of my 3 replication connections.

    -  Along the same lines.. some of my volumes are more important than others.  Allow me to prioritize/QoS the replication connections.

- On disk encryption

    - I don't really care if you store the key in firmware, etc. I'm more worried about when I have to send a bad drive back, I want to make sure its unrecoverable when its not in the array.

[BenLoveday]

Oh yeah, thought of a few more last night in my sleep :-P

- Some kind of QoS mechanism would be nice, I guess this might happen with VVOL support coming, would be nice to give particular VM's priority over others, etc. E.g. granular caching, rather than just enabling caching on a whole Datastore, or putting priority on hot cache queue

- SSL cert import for web management - think someone else has mentioned this before

- Oh, along the lines of my FC comment previously, even the option of chucking in some SAS HBAs and doing DAS between two-four hosts would be cool, kinda like the HP MSA SAS controllers can. Again just gives more connectivity options and the chassis support swapping out the HBAs - in theory :-)

- A central management tool of sorts would be handy. Infosight is bloody awesome but in some cases having internet connectivity to the array could be difficult. Also if you had multiple arrays it could help to manage them.

Think thats about it for now! Keep up the good work fellas :-)

[mgram128]

Ben,

Regarding "Central Management", Nimble OS version 2.x allow for up to four nimble arrays to be managed under a single UI.   You simply join arrays on the same management network to a group and you can then access them all from one place.   Optionally, you can take members of the group and join them in a pool to aggregated capacity and performance,  but if this is not a need for your environment, you can simple not pool resources and just management each array separately but from the same console.

[BenLoveday]

Thanks Mitch!

Unfortunately the arrays I have are physically separate and on different management networks. Is there any specific network requirement around using this feature?

Cheers!

Ben

[mgram128]

Ben,

In your scenario, I am assuming that one array is production and the other is for DR and they replicate to each-other?  In this case, you will not be able to join them into a single group for management (even if you were able to get them on the same management subnet).  Mitch

[ccolht99]

My wish list:

Multi-tenant support

     Destination end space and bandwidth control

     Source and destination volume and collection name difference allowed

     Replication controlled at the destination rather than the source

     Solid segregation of network traffic between customers

     Pools below the array level (customer buys 5T, they only can grow to 5T)

AIX support

NAS support

I think we need something like IBM's SAN Volume Controller that sits in front of a bunch of arrays providing services like this.

[m_chadwick]

Some small pieces of my wishlist (mostly with the vCenter plugin)

1) When creating a datastore with the vCenter plugin, it always adds 4 0's to the end of the datastore name in the Nimble management console and plug-in view

     - Also allow the underscore in the name

2) Be able to choose performance policy when creating a datastore

Definitely agree with the Veeam support and FC support as well.

[BenLoveday]

Thanks Mitch, in our case they are two completely separate arrays for separate clusters :-(

Cheers anyway!

Ben

[sgalbincea137]

*Whistles*

[jliu79]

"2. With Exchange running as a vm, do Exchange VSS snaps that clear the exchange logs."

Doesn't Nimble already have this feature?

[sgalbincea137]

Jason Liu wrote:

"2. With Exchange running as a vm, do Exchange VSS snaps that clear the exchange logs."

Doesn't Nimble already have this feature?

Yes it does. 

[mandersen81]

Jason Benway wrote:

2. With Exchange running as a vm, do Exchange VSS snaps that clear the exchange logs.

This is supported in the 2.1.4+ code release.   Providing you are doing iSCSI attached volumes from within the guest OS.

[sgalbincea137]

We're on 2.1.4 here and it does not seem to require in-guest iSCSI for Microsoft VSS. Ours are all on vmdk.

[J Benway]

My request was to support it when the DBs and logs are on vmdk on a vmfs volume similar to how veeam does.

jb

[jliu79]

ok, do you still need to install the toolkit in the Exchange VM for it to work?

[sgalbincea137]

Yes, you should have the toolkit installed so you have the Nimble VSS writer present in the VM.

[julez66]

Recent update to the Nimble wishlist.

Nimble Windows Toolkit version cannot be different than the Nimble OS version (older or newer).  If they are different then the VSS snaps fail completely which was confirmed by Nimble support.

The Nimble Windows Toolkit requires a reboot and the servers would need the reboot may not be able to be scheduled for maintenance the same time the Nimble OS can be updated.

Please fix this if possible.

[Nick_Dyer]

Hi Michael,

I had a chat with the VMware Plugin engineering team last week re appending zeros to the end of the volume name, and we've opened Request for Enhancement 57114 to track this requirement. If you (or anyone else to that matter) wish to increase focus from engineering please email support referencing this RFE to add your details.