EMC's Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) for Hyper-V

Have you found yourself managing some Hyper-V virtual machines and wondering "which storage array is this connected to?  or how much space do I have left in the volume"?  Maybe you were looking at your SAN and wondering "how many VMs are connected to this volume?  which ones?  how is it connected?"  Imagine from that same screen you could even choose to move a VM to another server based on the information you had found about the storage such as available disk space...

EMC's Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) does just this.  VSI is a GUI based tool (although you can use Powershell cmdlets if you want) that provides a mapping of Hyper-V virtual machine objects found in SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) and your EMC storage.  From a single console you can:

• Map virtual machines to CLARiiON or Symmetrix storage volumes.
• Map NTFS volumes to EMC storage.
• Map virtual machines to individual LUNs.
• Map Hyper-V hosts to storage arrays including target port details.
• Display disaster recovery sites.
• Choose to live migrate or quick migrate virtual machines

Here are some screen shots of this functionality..

 
Mapping of Child Partitions to EMC Storage

 

Mapping EMC Storage Array to Hyper-V Parent Partition

Using the DR options to move a VM to another node

What makes VSI so cool?  Well two reasons.  One is that it addresses a common complaint I hear from customers in that they have a hard time understanding the relationship between virtual machines and the underlying storage.  Typically the virtual server environment is managed by a different team from the storage team and trying to understand where a VM physically resides in the datacenter can be a challenge for many people. 

The other reason?   VSI is FREE.  Anyone with a Powerlink account can download it from the Support, Software Downloads and Licensing section of the website or reach out to your EMC technical consultant to provide you a copy.

For those of you that download VSI, please send us your thoughts on how we can continue to improve on it or send us your feedback on how this tool has helped you!