Since the announcement and release of EMC ViPR, you have probably seen many demos for the product. All are good and serve the purpose they were initially intended for, whether it was product training, live data use cases, or customer demos. However, all of those tools require a fairly significant footprint in order to be able to run them. What if you could experience the power of ViPR in a lightweight delivery? Now you can!
Introducing the ViPR Interactive Demo!
The beauty of the ViPR interactive demo is that it can be run on your laptop or tablet with a minimal tax on connectivity and storage. You don’t need to make a special request to access it, only then to be placed in queue for days. The data in the environment is sanitized directly from our two virtual data centers (both multi-million dollar investments). Leveraging an HTML5 front end and focusing on a select set of high priority customer use cases, this demo gives you the flexibility to improvise on your own or follow a scripted story line.
Let’s Get Started!
First, it is important to make sure that your browser accepts cookies and enables Javascript. The following browsers are supported:
- Google Chrome (version 34 or later)
- Mozilla Firefox (version 28 or later)
- Internet Explorer (version 9 or later with Compatibility Mode turned off)
Once ready, please visit the EMC ViPR Demo Page and you will immediately see the screen below (without any login required!):
Now you can access the ViPR user interface directly online without the need to deploy, configure, or request lab access. We built this demo as a playground for you. At a high level, this interactive demo can be used to explore ViPR’s concept of Software-Defined Storage.
The demo also provides a guided tour functionality. You can just click the Behind the Scenesbutton on the bottom right of the screen, at any time, and it will give you step-by-step highlights of different areas on the screen. This is especially helpful when you are not sure of what to do next.
What Are the Important Features?
You can review all how-to videos on the top navigation as well. Most importantly you could even discover new arrays and provision storage. Here is a suggestion of the flow you could go through:
- Add a Storage System
- Add a Virtual Array
- Add a Block Virtual Pool
- Select Catalog > View Catalog
- Go to Block Storage Services > Create Block Volume for a Host
- Fill out the form and click Order. It’s OK to select anything in the form.
- See the “magic” happen
- Order completed!
You don’t need to worry about damaging something as nothing will actually get provisioned in our data center. Everything in this demo only happens in your browser because, again, this tool is just a playground for you to experience the product.
You could also check out the ViPR integration with XtremIO. This is available in version 2.1. If you go to the Storage System page and select XtremIO, you can see the list of inputs required for discovery. In the production environment, the discovery adds the storage pools and storage ports to ViPR.
Last but not least, this demo also includes EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) Appliance. There are two Virtual Data Centers (vdc1 and vdc2), each with one ECS Appliance. At a high level, there are one or more commodity nodes within a Virtual Array. A Virtual Data Center (VDC) is composed of one or more Virtual Arrays. One or more VDCs form a Virtual Pool, which serves bucket creation for object.
Please go to Dashboard > Commodity Nodes to see the setup. We have four nodes in this ECS (boston or vdc1). You can expand on a single node to get a quick view of disks and status. The admin can also view the services running on the node. In this case, the commodity node is running Object Service.
Click on sandy-boston node and the following screen opens up:
This page provides a quick overview of the commodity node health. The node is hooked to 15 disks. Disk status is listed to show capacity and status. You can also see two network interfaces which have IPv4 and IPv6 address assigned to the node.
ViPR Services is fully geo-capable. It replicates data both within and across multiple sites for resiliency against site failures. A bucket can span multiple sites so any data can be written to or read from any site. We suggest you to go to the Object Virtual Pools page and test out a creation of a virtual pool with virtual arrays on both vdc1 and vdc2. After that, switch back and forth between two VDCs to confirm.
Note that this demo may not cover all the use cases. For example, it does not let you select a specific physical array when you create a new virtual array. Although there are two tenants – Provider Tenant and RainPole Tenant – all the data is the same for those tenants.
After you are finished playing with this demo, you can get in touch with an EMC rep by clicking the Request a Quote button on top. Otherwise if you would like to deploy a trial version, please download the ViPR Controller vApp to continue your evaluation. We plan to start work on the rest of the interactive demo in Q4 to ensure you have something cool to show to your colleagues.