VMAX AFA – Compression Notes

VMAX All Flash compression feature – released with HYPERMAX OS 5977.945.890

Some key points:
1. This new feature compresses data before it is written to flash drives.
2. Compression is managed per Storage Group level.
3. Approx 2:1 savings in storage efficiency.
4. One compression I/O module is required per director, which are installed on all VMAX All Flash systems. Continue reading

vRealize Automation 7.1 – Installation (Part 1)

This post will provide a step-by-step walk through installation of vRA 7.1, utilising the vRA wizard based install and configuration utility.

This example focuses on the ‘Enterprise Install’ for a distributed, highly-available vRA instance, using the wizard-driven walk through for the installation. The wizard helps to drive such tasks as importing the user generated certificates, creates your vRA SQL database and automatically fixes any issues on the IaaS Windows machines encountered during validation, for example removing MS patches that impede the install or fix IIS related configurations.

This post does not cover pre-requisite tasks such as:

  • Deploying the vRA appliance.
  • Provisioning & joining domain for the required Windows 2012r2 servers detailed on the infrastructure list below, SQL|Web|DEM|Agent machines.
  • SQL server installation.
  • DNS entries for all the components including virtual IP addresses.
  • Ensuring NTP & time is correct across all related components.
  • IaaS associated user accounts.

Continue reading