Test Results: ViPR Integration with VMware

Recently, Principled Technologies (PT), a leader in fact-based technology assessments, conducted a hands-on evaluation of ViPR involving a series of use-case scenarios, including storage automation and provisioning, monitoring and reporting, VMware integration, and object services.  The results of this testing have been published by PT in the report “Realizing Software-Defined Storage with EMC ViPR” (Principled Technologies, April 2014). To acquaint you with the report and the hard facts within, we’ll publish a series of excerpts over the next few weeks.

VMware Integration

In this excerpt, we’ll look at the test results for ViPR integration with VMware:

“In addition to integration with monitoring applications, EMC extends the ViPR product for integration into virtual environments, such as VMware vSphere. From direct integration with vCenter to plugins and integration packs that enhance virtual environment monitoring, orchestration, and cloud deployments, EMC ViPR makes storage automation an excellent companion for virtualization administrators,
and delivers on the promises of a software-defined datacenter. Organizations using EMC ViPR with VMware provide their customers the means to consume their storage through VMware. A VMware vSphere environment with ViPR integrations enables users to orchestrate workflows, present ViPR-supported storage, and monitor their software-defined storage solution along with the rest of their virtualized infrastructure through vCenter and vCloud tools.”

“For environments with rapid provisioning needs, such as virtualized cloud environments, EMC ViPR can be leveraged by VMware vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) to enable users to provision and deploy multiple VMs with customized storage needs. We set up vCAC in our test environment to show how easily end users can leverage the ViPR storage automation.”

"We compared ViPR's automated method with manually creating new storage, and making that storage ready for VM deployment. As Figure 18 shows, compared to the manual approach on both VMAX and VNX, using ViPR to provision block storage for VM reduced the number of steps by up to 54.0 percent and reduced time by up to 63.7 percent."

Provision block storage for VM	Number of admin   steps	ViPR reduced   steps by…	Admin time (mm:ss)	ViPR reduced   time by…
ViPR	23		02:10
Manual - VMAX	50	54.0%	05:58	63.7%
Manual - VNX	43	46.5%	04:00	45.8%

Figure 18:Time and number of steps to perform the block storage for VM provisioning task with and without ViPR. Fewer steps and less time are better.

Source: “Realizing Software-Defined Storage with EMC ViPR” (Principled Technologies, April 2014).

For more detailed information about the hands-on testing of ViPR integration with VMware, please see the section about VMware Integration (pages 16-23) and Appendix I – Provisioning Block Storage for a VM (pages 48-50) and Appendix J – Provisioning File Storage for a VM(pages 51-54) in the report “Realizing Software-Defined Storage with EMC ViPR” (Principled Technologies, April 2014).