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Simplify VM and Storage Management with the Latest Tintri vSphere Web Client Plug-in (VCP)

Intelligent Infrastructure Blog - Simplify VM and Storage Management with the Latest Tintri vSphere Web Client Plugin (VCP)

Simplify VM and Storage Management with the Latest Tintri vSphere Web Client Plug-in (VCP)

 

This week Tintri released the VMware vSphere Web Client Plug-in (VCP) 3.0.2.1, which is fully compatible with the latest vSphere releases from VMware, including the current version, vSphere 7.0 Update 2. This version of Tintri VCP is compatible with vSphere 6.7 and later; previous versions of Tintri VCP are compatible with vSphere 6.5 and earlier. It’s probably a good time to upgrade vSphere 7 if you haven’t already.

 

Background

Some VMware customers running virtual machines on VMstore may not be aware of what they can do with VCP and how it simplifies administrators’ lives. Let’s do a quick recap.

Tintri vSphere Web Client Plug-in empowers storage and server administrators to leverage Tintri VMstore’s VM-aware capabilities via native VMware tools, which further simplifies day-to-day management of large virtualized environments.

The Tintri VCP approach is really flexible because it lets customers continue to use familiar and native vSphere Web Client interfaces AND GAIN the added intelligence of Tintri VMstore systems such as per-VM data management and end-to-end latency visualization – all directly from within the VMware vCenter interface.

That sound great, but what does it really mean?

Tintri VMstore is Intelligent Infrastructure. Yeah, we know this sounds like marketing fluff, but it’s really not an exaggeration. With Tintri VMstore, the vast majority of storage administrative tasks are completed autonomous. A handful of manual tasks are still usually required – mostly around data protection and troubleshooting – but with Tintri VCP, even these can be performed from the vSphere console, where vSphere admins already tend to spend a good portion of their day. They no longer need to log into Tintri Global Center (TGC) or Tintri VMstore interfaces to execute the following tasks:

  • Data protection activities – snapshots and replication, including large-scale cloning and scaling for dev/test and DR – can all be done through vSphere with Tintri VCP.
  • Similar advantages apply when troubleshooting things like bottlenecks. Though VMstore is usually not the root cause of the issue, it provides amazing insight into the infrastructure as a whole, so administrators can pinpoint the specific virtual machine causing the issue – again without leaving the vSphere console.

What else?

One of the really cool features of Tintri VCP is its ability to leverage vSphere’s RBAC rules for managing VMs. For example, the VCP configuration enables a departmental admin to access and control storage for the set of VMs he/she is specifically responsible for, but it restricts the admin from making changes to VMs for which they are not responsible.  This enables enterprise-wide admins to move relevant tasks closer to the specific admins who need to manage them.

What has changed?

The overall functionality and advantages have not fundamentally changed throughout the VCP versions. But when VMware dropped support for vSphere thick clients and flash clients within a very short time period, a few features were no longer compatible in the new HTML 5 client.  The short version of this story is that Tintri has caught up with all the rapid changes from VMware and our toolset is now fully compatible with HTML 5 – so you can get your work done as efficiently as ever!

If you have tried the Tintri VCP client in the past but stopped using it for whatever reason, now is the time to revisit and see for yourself how you can further streamline your storage management processes for VMware environments with Tintri Intelligent Infrastructure.

Here’s a vote of confidence from one of our long-time customers who is an expert on both VMware and Tintri technologies:~ Magus Osterlund

“I am very happy to report that the VCP plugin works like a charm!”

~ Magus Osterlund
VMware Solution Specialist

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