Last week Chad Sakac over at Virtual Geek has released the news about the availability of the EMC CelerraVSA Version 5.6.48.701.
What’s new:
•New OVA packaging, configuration for latest VMware tools and pvSCSI config – note this makes it vSphere 4 only (the VMware Workstation versions are also provided)
•New dedupe/compression code (faster, better, stronger)
•New VM-level hardware-accelerated fast clone (snapshot) and full clone (clone)
•Support for the new vSphere NFS Plugin.
•Better performance with less CPU, memory constrained configs
•Fixed issue in the 5.6.47.11 version that made eth2 not work right.
•And much, much more!!!
I’ve downloaded the CelerraVSA OVA and deployed this virtual storage appliance within my vSphere 4 environment on SSD storage but it doesn’t seem to make a big difference compared to deploying it local at SATA storage. I also added an 8 GB virtual disk to one of my existing virtual machines, the 8 GB disk is hosted at the EMC CelerraVSA which is connected trough iSCSI to one of the other ESX servers so the iSCSI data flows through the dedicated iSCSI network.
I did some tests with HDtunepro to find out what this Virtual Storage Appliance is up to and it’s looks to perform reasonable well for a VSA. Compared to a local SATA disk it’s about 10 times slower so it‘s not very fast but keep in mind that this is a full Celerra Simulator and can be used to familiarize yourself with all the great features like dedupe and replication. Besides that, it’s fully equipped with everything you need to build an SRM4 setup in a box.
