Free WebEx – How to Simplify Management with EMC VSI Plugin for VMware vSphere

With EMC World and the hands on labs now behind me for another year, I have now come up for a breath of air, am recharging my batteries and have put together a webinar for this Thursday (7th July 2012) which covers the fun topic of the EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) plug-in for VMware vSphere.

Some of you may of heard of the VSI plug-in before, though for those of you that haven’t, it is a plug-in for VMware vSphere that provides the ability to perform many of the typical day-to-day storage related tasks that a VMware administrator would want to perform – all from within the vSphere Client interface! Many of you, like myself, that have been a systems and/or VMware administrator will know that this type of functionality and convenience can save you a significant amount of time during an average day, rather than having to flick between management utilities and interfaces.  Which can also be prone to mistakes being made.

If you are an existing EMC storage customer running VMware vSphere in your environment, or are potentially looking at purchasing an EMC storage product then this webinar will be of interest to you.  I will be assisted in the Q&A chat room during the webinar by vSpecialist, fellow vGeek, blogger and all-round great guy, Erik Zandoer (www.vmdamentals.com), along with one of the highly talented VSI plug-in developers (and another great guy), Josh Hutt!

Even if you don’t currently have any EMC storage, then you can download and use the VSI plug-in against the EMC VNX virtual storage appliance (VSA), which is ideal for a vSphere work/home lab environment.  You can download the EMC VNX VSA from here (free to download and use), also check out my EMC webinar from last year on installing and running the VNX VSA in a vSphere lab here which may be of use.

Here is an example of the functionality that will be made available to you via the VMware vSphere Client and the EMC VSI plug-in:

• Provision new NFS, VMFS and RDM storage
• Extend existing NFS and VMFS storage
• Compress virtual machines in NFS datastores (now including VNXe)
• Clone virtual machines in NFS datastores (now including VNXe)
  -  Fast Clones support – Limited to the same file system
  -  Full Clones support – Limited to file systems on the same Data Mover
• Integration with VMware View
• Integration with Citrix XenDesktop
• View properties of datastores and virtual machines
• View a higher level of detail into the configuration of the underlying physical EMC based storage, including performance data!

So come along and join me for the “How to Simplify Management with EMC VSI Plugin for VMware vSphere” WebEx and find out how this useful free VMware vSphere plug-in can help you and your business.

Click here to register – also free!

Hope to see you there!