VMware integration with Compellent Storage

DISCLAIMER: I work for a Company which is a Compellent Business Partner, we sell and provide consultancy services on Compellent products.

Given my job, I deal every day with VMware customers, and, at least in Italy, the most misunderstood and mishandled aspect of a virtual infrastructure is the storage part.

VMware introduces another powerful layer on top of the already complex SAN scenario and this often confuse the customers even more, in order to mitigate this several big storage names (NetApp and EMC in primis) created plugins to seamlessly manage storage directly from the familiar vSphere client, hiding many of the repetitive and sometimes complex tasks.

Compellent may not be the first at the game but they surely took an interesting approach, they provide integration at both ends of the storage stack.

In fact you can provision and manage the storage from a vSphere plugin (expected to be GA during Q4) or you can do the same from Enterprise Manager, which is the management interface for your Compellent storage infrastructure (provides a single pane-of-glass on all your Compellent systems).

This approach in my opinion gives you a great degree of flexibility, if you’re a storage guy and you’re in charge to provide storage to your company’s VMware infrastructure you can use your familiar storage GUI to provision storage at the Datastore level and if you’re a multiple-caps IT guy, you can use the vSphere client to do the same with a simple wizard, without getting your hands dirty inside the storage interface.

Below you can find a couple of videos showing the integration at both ends:

vSphere Plugin

Enterprise Manager integration