JasonSamuel.com

PowerPath/VE replaces the native mulipathing plugin which gives you incredible performance gains when managing your EMC Clariion SANs. You have to push this plugin to all your vSphere/ESX hosts to take advantage of it. Using VMware Update Manager is the easiest solution but I ran into a problem. Adding a 3rd party extension requires adding a patch repository in VUM and it only accepts web URLs. So I would have to setup a dedicated web server just for this patch repository which is ridiculous. Instead I decided to leverage my Virtual Center server itself since I knew it uses a Tomcat installation to display the vCenter web GUI and webservices. Some quick Googling and I found Joshua Townsend had the exact same idea and wrote a nice guide to do this already:

http://vmtoday.com/2010/02/installing-powerpathve-using-vmware-update-manager/

Once I set it up the way Joshua describes and pointed VUM to the patch repository URL hosted by vCenter, it worked perfectly. You will notice in my screenshot below Connectivity Status says “Connected” now.

Recently I was able to participate in a project involving FLARE code updates on some EMC Clariion SANs and I had a great discussion with an EMC consultant.  Lots of technical details I won’t bore you to death with (or maybe save for another post?).  Anyhow, I did some digging later to learn more and found a great article on the history of FLARE vs Enginuity at StorageNerve.  Bet you never knew the vault drives were being brought up with Windows XP, huh?   Shhh…don’t tell anyone your $$$$$$ array is really a Windows box.

http://storagenerve.com/2009/01/06/emc-clariion-flare-code-operating-environment/