Overview

The Dell EMC PowerMax Integration (formerly known as VMAX) allows to discover and collect information about components in your PowerMax and supported VMAX environments. PowerMax is a storage array that allows administrators to allocate and present storage to hosts. PowerMax arrays have complex relationships between the internal components of the array. Some of the components are physical and some are logical. These physical and logical components are referred to as entities in IO.

The PowerMax environment includes a management appliance known as EMC Unisphere for PowerMax. Unisphere presents a user interface for PowerMax administrators and a REST API for monitoring the PowerMax arrays. The PowerMax Integration uses the REST API to discover the physical and logical entities of the arrays and to retrieve performance data from many of these entities.

Physically, a PowerMax array contains directors, ports, cache, and storage. Front‐end directors manage the host‐facing front‐end ports, back‐end directors manage the storage‐facing back‐end ports. A PowerMax array has a cache which is used by both front‐end and back‐end directors to transfer data to and from the PowerMax array and external hosts. A PowerMax installation also includes physical storage (which can be flash or traditional rotating media) but much of the detail of the physical storage has been abstracted by PowerMax and instead is managed by logical entities. The following diagram shows the physical elements of PowerMax.

Logically, a PowerMax is administered by managing hosts, front‐end ports, and storage groups. Hosts contain initiators and are aggregated into groups called host groups. The hosts get access to the volumes via assigned groupings of front‐end ports called port groups. Logical volumes are derived from the storage allocated to storage groups. Storage groups are aggregated in storage resource pools (SRP). The host group, port group, and storage groups together form the masking view. The following diagram shows the logical elements of PowerMax.

This integration provides you with greater insight into your PowerMax environment, enabling organizations to align infrastructure service delivery to the needs of applications. The PowerMax Integration also offers problem resolution using real‐time performance information.