lithion wrote:
Well. I still remember vmworld last year. HPE claimed to be the first storage vendor to support vvol replication from day 1. In the mean time vsphere 6.5 was released, but it took several months before 3.3.1 was even announced. Now we are almost a year later since vmworld and 3.3.1 is still not available for our boxes. I requested an upgrade, but they refused because the configuration of the boxes is too complex. Although there's nothing really special on them: 4 x volumes (2TB) and about 100 VM's on vvol.
I think your memory isn't quite 100% on this. I was at VMworld last year, and was in our vVol session that Eric Siebert did. I'm also at VMworld now (where we had a session talking about vVol replication). Last year we did not claim support for replication because it wasn't part of the VASA 2.0 provider that was available at that time. I have the slides from that session in 2016 and they specifically say that a drawback of vVols is that replication isn't supported yet. It was released this year with the VASA 3.0 provider.
As of last week, only two arrays supported array replication with vVols - 3PAR and Nimble. Yes, 3PAR requires 3.3.1. If you requested the 3.3.1 early when it was in controlled release, you might not have qualified but I've heard just about anyone who asks now can get it and it should be widely available soon. Feel free to email me and I'm happy to help. My email is calvin dot zito at hpe dot com. Note I will be traveling home from VMworld on Thursday so won't be of much help until I'm home.