EMC Enhances Management of Virtualized Microsoft Applications

EMC issued a Press Release today to announce new EMC solutions and technologies for virtualized Microsoft Applications as customers Journey to the Cloud with Microsoft Virtualization. What exactly does this mean? Well as customers embark on their journey to the Private Cloud by virtualizing key business applications with Microsoft Hyper-V, they need advanced technologies to help simplify management and provide data protection for the virtual landscape. For most companies, this includes a combination of technologies from a variety of vendors including tools such as Microsoft System Center as well as tools from EMC as highlighted in the release. For those of you who have been following my blog, you've already read about many of these solutions!

There are two main components to the press release. First, EMC has several tools available to help customers manage their private cloud infrastructure.

• For customers who are using System Center, EMC has a System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) management pack for EMC hardware to provide visualization of the SAN environment including health reporting on EMC SAN devices. I posted a blog update about this capability back on April 22^nd.
• The other System Center plug-in is an EMC PRO (Performance Resource and Optimization) Pack for System Center Virtual Machine Manager. EMC's PRO pack will alert an administrator when an EMC volume hosting Hyper-V virtual machines is low on space and will present the VM administrator with a PRO tip. The PRO tip contains details about the alert and the low space warning and will present the administrator with the option to migrate the VMs off of the volume that is low on space onto another volume on the array that has available capacity. Why is this important? Without this scenario, there is a chance that the volume could fill up with data and cause any other VMs sharing the same disks to shut down unexpectedly causing potential data loss.
• EMC also announced a new tool called EMC Storage Integrator (ESI). ESI is designed for the Windows administrator and it removes much of the complexity associated with managing storage, especially for the Windows or application administrator. ESI is a MMC tool and the main console displays the Windows servers, applications and EMC storage in the customer's environment. From here the administrator can select a series of wizards to perform tasks such as auto configure storage or set up a disk for clustering. Imagine answering a few questions about your application (like Sharepoint) and the tool takes care of creating storage LUNs, assigning permissions, formatting drives, assigning drive letters and presenting disks to Windows. I've alluded to this tool in several blog posts as we gave a preliminary demo at MMS and anyone attending EMC World or Microsoft TechEd will have a chance to see the latest version! For those of you who can't make it, I'll be posting a blog post and demo of this tool soon!

The second component to the release was to highlight some of the performance numbers that EMC has published when running Microsoft Hyper-V on the VNX array. I blogged about some of these already including the Microsoft Sharepoint with Hyper-V and EMC VNX as well as the SQL Server performance numbers with Hyper-V on VNX. You may have already seen the performance numbers that were published in the press release but they are worth repeating:

• EMC VNX deployed with FAST Cache delivers incremental benefits over VNX deployed alone including increases in virtualized SQL Server performance up to 300%, enables incremental management of up to1.6 million Exchange emails without the addition of new hardware, improves SharePoint Search crawl performance by up to 91% and reduces search response time by up to 27%.
• EMC Replication Manager simplifies end-to-end protection and recovery of virtualized applications and can restore a 100 GB SharePoint content database within 6 minutes and as well as automating recovery of SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint.

Why is this important? When virtualizing on EMC VNX you can expect improved performance as you consolidate your workloads!

There are some exciting things going on including more updates and announcements around EMC World next week (May 8^th-12^th) and Microsoft TechEd the week after (May 16^th-20^th) so stay tuned!!