3 Reasons for switching to HPE Nimble Storage H5 vCenter plugin

[barryram121]

NimbleOS 5.1 just went IPR and with that we are excited to introduce the new feature rich HPE Nimble Storage HTML5 vCenter plugin. The plugin lets VMware adminstrators to access and manage 3 different functionalities from a single plugin within the vCenter.

With the latest NimbleOS 5.1, the HPE Nimble Storage - VMware integration team, has made it easy to administrator your VMFS and VVol infrastructure from with the vCenter.

The vCenter plugin is not new to HPE Nimble Storage. The first vCenter plugin for thick clients was released with NimbleOS 2.x followed by support for flex client with NimbleOS 2.3.

With NimbleOS 5.0.x, our first H5 plugin was released to support VVol workflows. 

NimbleOS 5.1 now has extended the vCenter plugin to provide additonal functionalities. 3 new features have been added to the plugin,

1. VMFS workflows

2. VVol  workflows

3. Configuration Checker

The VMFS workflows now allows administrators to create, delete, grow and mount VMFS volumes as well as snapshot and clone volumes from within the plugin.

Performance and protection information for each volume is also shown in the plugin. Detailed information about IOPS (R,W), badndwith usage and preoction schedule informations including volume collection and recovery point are shown.

The same functions can also be performed contextually right within the datastore page on the vCenter. Just have to right click on the datastore and select Nimble options.

Moving on to the VVol worklflows, we have carried forward all of the cool functionlities over from the NimOS 5.x plugin.

Simplified Workflows for VM recovery in vCenter Plugin 

–Granular restore based on selectable recovery points

–Restore in place or clone a VM from local snapshots

–Restore individual disks or attach cloned disks to another VM

–Bring up a VM at a replication site (via a clone)

–Protection against accidental deletion of VMs ( Primary or Replication site)

Monitoring of VM capacity and Performance

Application consistent Snapshots (VSS for VVols)

–Extended VSS integration for application running on VVol VMs

–Enables application level features such as verify backups and exchange log truncation

VM Recycle Bin

–VM Deletion is deferred for 72 hours

–Can be claimed from the Replica site

Here is a refresher to the feature sets that were incorprated within the plugin. Similar to VMFS, there are contextual actions available for VVol volumes from the datastore view of the vCenter.  Adminstrators on can efficiently manage both VMFS and VVols through a single pane of glass within vCenter.

The third facet to the new plugin is Configuration Checker. This feature helps administrators to quickly run checks against their environements for best practices on storage and networks such as mulitpathing, jumbo frames, VMNic port to VMK port mapping, dead path, psp rules etc.The full list of the 18 rule checks can be found here,

Here is also a video tutorial about the new vCenter plugin.

I hope you have fun installing and playing around with the new HPE Nimble Storage H5 vCenter plugin.