5 Easy Steps to Install and Configure Tintri

The first indication of how ‘easy-to-use’ your storage is going to be

By: Jack Bornhoft

Every storage provider touts their products are ‘easy-to-use.’ After all, who would brag that their solutions are exceedingly complex? But the definition of ‘easy-to-use’ is a sliding scale. Recently, a competitor bragged on Twitter that their installation expert had a new unit up-and-running at a customer site in just two days!

While installation and configuration is only a moment in time, it’s a great indicator of just how easy storage will be to manage. And at one of our top storage partners, Tintri, their standards are a little more extreme.

Most of our customers take their shiny, new Tintri from box to ready-for-production in less than 30 minutes—with no install experts (heck, not even any storage experts) required. To make that more concrete, Tintri challenged Quaero, a customer in North Carolina to install a Tintri T5060 all-flash VMstore in less time than it takes to deliver a pizza. When their IT Administrator, Don Thompson, was ready to begin, we ordered our pizza… Who finished first? You can watch the video to find out, and you can even sign up to take the Tintri Pizza Challenge yourself.

How is it that Tintri can be ready for production in less than 30 minutes? It’s their VM-aware architecture—making the storage visible to your hypervisor takes just five easy steps:

1. Unbox your Tintri. Make sure your X-Acto knife is ready, so you don’t lose any time.

tintriblog1

2. Attach the rails. This is the most time consuming step for some customers. You have to attach the rails and slide in the unit (this is the only step where you need a second person—Tintri is heavy).

3. Power it on.

4. Assign an IP address. It may actually take longer to say it than to do it.

5. Mount the hypervisor. Head over to your hypervisor, add storage and make sure you’ve selected Network File System in the respective wizard.

That’s it. You are ready to start moving virtual machines over to your new Tintri. And keep in mind, since you’re using Tintri VM-aware storage (VAS), you won’t need to spend any time carving up LUNs, configuring RAID, striping data, or any other leftovers of conventional storage. The virtual machines that you’re moving over to Tintri are all managed as INDIVIDUAL virtual machines. In a future blog post, we’ll show you how to guarantee the performance of any virtual machine across your Tintri footprint.

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