In this video we will be demonstrating how to provision Scale IO software defined storage from within the vSphere web client. Traditional storage array provisioning can be a tedious process handled by experienced storage administrators consulting massive spreadsheets and issuing bizarre commands through proprietary command line interfaces. But Enterprise IT is undergoing a significant transformation in order to provide cloud-like service at a much faster pace, and IT staffing is following suit.
The lines separating storage, network, and virtualization admins are disappearing as teams are combined and fewer people are being asked to do more. The technology enabling this transformation is software defined storage like Scale IO combined with a hypervisor like VMware vSphere to provide a hyper converged solution. With a variety of skill sets present within an enterprise IT group, your storage solution should provide management options tailored to their preferences.
Scaleo does just this by offering several means of managing the system and provisioning storage. There is, of course, the Scaleo GUI, simple and intuitive. There's also the Scale AO command line should you probably prevent you from using a GUI, and because the cloud transformation is largely about automation, Scale AO can also be managed via a REST API.
Finally, the focus of this demonstration is the vSphere vCenter plug-in for the vSphere web client. More and more virtualization teams are assuming ownership of storage, particularly when it is delivered in a hyperconverged solution. Providing an interface that is both familiar to them and easily accessible within vSphere is a key enabler of their success.
Today we are showing how to use the vSphere plug-in to provision and share 10 Scale AO volumes to ESX and create a data store. We start by opening the web client and selecting the Scale AO plug-in from the home screen. When it loads, we choose the storage pool from which the new volumes will be provisioned. Right clicking on the desired pool, we select Create Volume to start the wizard.
We first need to select the name for the volume. This will serve as a root name if multiple volumes are created. We will create 10 volumes. Each one terabyte in size thinly provisioned and using ram read cache. Then we'll select the vSphere data center or individual ESX hosts to which the new volumes will be mapped. When it finishes, the volumes will be created and mapped to all of the ESX servers in our data center. Closing the window, we now need to create a data store on one of the newly connected volumes.
We'll verify the volumes are present, then create the data stored via the native web client wizard. To confirm the devices are connected, we'll view one of our ESX hosts and view the storage devices under the manage tab. There we see all 10 of our new volumes. With that confirmed, let's create our new data store. We select the type BMFS.
Then locate the device from which the data store will be created. Note that while being shared over Ethernet, the volumes appear within ESX as EMC fiber channel disks. ESX has a limited set of device types, and Scaleo is much closer to fiber channel than IUI from an operational and capability standpoint.
To verify our data store has been created, we select the data store view and look for data store 3 in the demo videos data center. There we see our new 1 terabyte VMFS data store ready to host virtual machines. Thank you for watching. I hope you found this demo helpful and consider partnering with Scaleo to power your data center transformation.
