Cisco SMART Zoning - Yes it is Smart enough !

Smart Zoning is pretty awesome and I highly recommend it to anyone. The basic idea is that you will create a smart zone as various types. In my example i'm going with a 15 host ESX environment called ESXProd connect to two fabrics, A and B on separate HBA ports. Each fabric has two VMAX FA ports shared by the ESX hosts.  Using traditional 1-to-1 zoning each host would have something like this:

ESX1_HBA1_7e1 VSAN 1
ESX1_HBA1_9e1 VSAN 1
ESX1_HBA2_8e1 VSAN 2
ESX1_HBA2_10e1 VSAN 2

Each zone contains two member pwwn - one for the server's HBA and one for the FA Port. All in i'd have 60 zones (4 zones times 15 hosts) to manage and deal with.

Using a one-to-many SmartZone we allow a single initiator to connect to multiple targets.  That means my zoning per server is now:

ESX1_HBA1_7e1_9e1 VSAN 1
ESX1_HBA2_8e1_10e1 VSAN 2

Each zone has three pwwn - one for the server's HBA, and two for the FA Ports. It's a lot less zones than the traditional approach,  but it's still 30 zones in all. I think the better option is the many-to-one SmartCone which allows multiple initiators to talk to a single target. sing this we end up with far less zones, like this:

ESXProd_7e1 VSAN 1
ESXProd_9e1 VSAN 1
ESXProd_8e1 VSAN 2
ESXProd_10e1 VSAN 2

Each SmartConnect zone contains 16 pwwn.  15 for server HBA WWNs and 1 for the FA WWN.  Total zones used?  Four.  When adding a new ESX host to this cluster we simple modify the SmartZone to add a new member pwwn.

The third option,  which Cisco does not recommend but does work is many-to-many.  We'd end up with two zones, one per fabric.

You can zone using device alias, pwwn, fcid, or fc alias as members in SmartZones. Enable SmartZone at the fabric, zone, or zoneset level..

When you add a member it's just like the current syntax except you have to specify it as either init, target, or both:

member pwwn 10:00:00:12:134:56:99 target

Zoning then will only allow initiators to talk to targets and not other initiators.

Enabling Smart Zoning is as simple as  "zone smart-zoning enable vsan 100".   Then you have to convert your existing zones... you can do it per zone, vsan, zonetset, or fc alias like so: "zone convert smart-zoning zone name <name> vsan <n>" or "zone convert smart-zoning vsan <n>"


If, for whatever reason, you need an target to talk to a target or init to init you just disable Smart Zoning on that zone: "no attribute disable-smart-zoning" inside that zone..

VPLEX Best Practices Document - Release: November 2013

Hello Friends,


Here you can download the EMC VPLEX Planning and Best Practices Document.


All rights reserved for EMC. No un-authorized copying or editing. If you want to download the copy, you can login to support.emc.com and use your customer login to download

SRDF/A Concat META Expansion

Am back !!

Today am gonna take you on a issue which I faced during a recent device expansion in Symmetrix VMAX.

Adding additional 100 Gigs to an existing RDF Concat Meta. But how ???

(Click to expand)

1) Create devices on R1 and R2 and R2 Clone as per their hyper sizes.
2) Terminate Clone Session on R2
3) Disable consistency on R1 group
4) Suspend RDF links for that group
5) Do a delete pair on the R1 group. This is an IMPORTANT step.
6) Add the created hypers to the existing META on R1 side (Remember this procedure is exclusively for Concat META expansion)
7) Add the created hypers to the existing META on R2 side.
8) Add the created hypers to the existing META on R2 Clone.
9) Establish a new R1 - R2 Sync with the mode ACP_Disk. This would be a fresh sync between R1 and R2 as the new devices which were added to the concat META will adjust the META Geometry. Since this sync will take time, its better to set the mode to ACP_DISK.
10) You can either create a temporary RDF group and later on move the pair to the actual production group or you can directly add the pair to the actual production group.
11) Once the device state changes to "Synchronized", we have to change the mode to ASYNC and then suspend the RDF group to move the pair to the actual group.
12) Once the move pair operation is complete, we can resume the RDF links and enable the consistency on the actual group which will show the state of the device pair as "Consistent".
13) So we have completed the R1 - R2 setup. Now moving over to the R2 Clone setup.
14) Since we terminated the previous clone session, we will be using the same set of clone devices and will create a clone pair.
15) You can create a pairing file with the R2 and R2 Clone device(s) and create the clone session with the -PRECOPY option. This will start the background copy of the device and the host can access data through it. 
16) You can keep the devices in precopy mode always or you can activate the clone copy which will change the status of the devices to "Copied" status.

Thats it !.. Your R1 - R2 and R2 Clone Concat META expansion is complete. You can ask the platform guys to expand the drive at their end so that the new size would be visible to them.

IBM SVC (SAN Volume Controller) - or - Ease of use Storage provisioning

Okay friends.. in this post am gonna take an overview of IBM SVC GUI. How things look and how it works.

IBM SVC mainscreen or the launch page which gives a summary of the storage being provided from the "SAN Volume Controller". I dont know if SVC has some of its internal storage but when it comes to support of External storage through this SAN volume controller - it is a good choice. It supports Storage provision and Migration of data from Heterogeneous to Heterogeneous storage arrays.
(Click to expand)

But wait - Did I say anything bout the SVC Architecture. No - Am not going to cover anything bout the architecture but again - a look at how the SVC logical structure looks like.
(Click to expand)

Claiming storage from other arrays:

When the storage is masked to the ports of SVC, the LUNs are automatically or manually organized in different storage pools. (The storage pools can be user defined or dynamic names). Once the LUNs are added to different storage pools, the capacity of the pool will be visible as shown in the picture.
(Click to expand)

IBM SVC Volumes - Yes !! they are called as volumes in SVC but not LUNs. A summary of how LUNs look like.
(Click to expand)

Using the "new Volume" create wizard:
(Click to expand)

As you can see from the above pic, volume creation options - Generic Volume, Thin-Provision, Mirror, Thin Mirror and Compressed. I use thin-provision as am concerned bout space. Using this one page wizard, users can create a volume or instead we can create and map it straight away to a host. Once a volume is created, it will be given a unique ID and a unique LUN ID. Both can be used for quick references.

Lets have a look at a sample volume properties.
(Click to expand)

IBM SVC Diagnostics - Troubleshooting an unknown issue:
In SVC we can create support bundles which in turn can be uploaded onto the IBM Support cases for analysis. The support bundles can be big enough to upload it onto the support site, so work with your IBM personnel to get it working.

Hope you liked this post. I would be glad to hear any views.

EMC VPLEX or IBM SVC ?

I prefer EMC VPLEX instead of IBM SVC. Guess why ?

? Cost - No !
? High Performance - No !
? Availability - No !
? Easy to use Aka User Friendly - No !

Then what is it ??????

I would say "Distributed volumes in a VPLEX Metro" which server storage when there is a site failure or a disaster without any disruption to Host / Application I/O. That is one of the best features of VPLEX which makes it one of the best storage products for mission critical environments.

Why, Why and Why ?

I know this sounds a bit weird post but I had to write it. Few questions posted by some blog readers as to why I post content which has no "technical deepdive". Yes - Am not a deep dive blogger but I do post content which is useful for a user in a way. 

Whether it be just provisioning storage or business continuity using remote replication - I keep the concept straight forward and quickly accessible to the end users. 

But anywayz, thanks for bringing this to my notice. I will try to be more specific and upto the point in my coming posts.

Good day all.

SRDF - Simple (Symmetrix) Remote Data Facility

Alright... been ages I wrote something on SRDF. Let me write something bout the much talked about - Performance issues with SRDF/A. But before I do that, here is a simple layout on how a SRDF looks like. (Click to expand)

Basic storage fact of life: if you're doing synchronous replication, the source has overhead and delay because remote write operations must be confirmed. That limits the distance for synchronous to 300 km over fiber, per http://www.intellimagic.net/intellimagic/what-is-spm/copy-services/srdfs. Asynchronous avoids that.
Storage systems are reliant upon the network in one way or another. EMC DMX SRDF synchronous data replication, NetApp MetroCluster node-to-node communication, data replication, iSCSI and NDMP backups all rely on the network to be stable and functioning. But sometimes, it's not, and network troubleshooting is required to fix the problem.

Virtual Provisioning with SRDF:
.Storage is allocated in extents of 768KB
.SRDF operations continue to be supported with the granularity of blocks (512 bytes)
.SRDF supports connecting a VP device to another VP device (thin to thin only)
.Indirection penalty with every write
.Noticable at high I/O rates
.Consequently more SRDF CPU power is needed to achieve equivalent performance

.Maximal 2500 IOPS (roughly, still doing testing and engineering)

Best Practice Consideratoins:
.Always consider disk throughput requirements when creating or growing a data device pool
.Segregate applications by pools if they won’t play well together
.Use R1 or R5 (3+1) when write performance is critical. Use R6 for highest available within a thin pool.
.Pre-allocate capacity if response sensitive applications expand by randomly writing into new space.
.Use concatenated meta volumes for ease of expansion
.Be aware of performance considerations of replication

.General performance tuning principles still apply to thin devices

Data Domain DD990 Chassis layout

Below pics show the DD990 Hardware Chassis layout: (Click to expand)

Data Domain AutoSupport bundle

Below pic shows how we gather the support bundle required for Data Domain issues. Once the support bundle is generated, upload it to EMC case for analysis.

Integrating ISILON with Networker 8

I added ISILON to the Networker console for NDMP backups. And it worked like a charm.

Have a look at this pic (Click to expand)

ISILON SyncIQ Remote Replication Explained

Alright guys... Here I come with my ISILON SyncIQ 7.1 Remote Replication setup on two clusters. To be noted, this is an IP based remote replication and not a Fiber based replication wherein we can expect high amount of traffic / data flow in seconds.

So for the SyncIQ to work correctly, we require two ISILON Clusters with identical Source and Target directories. You can replicate SMB or NFS shares as well.

Lets start with the SyncIQ policy creation: (Click to expand)

More pics.. (Click to expand)

Once the policy is created, we can modify the policy settings as per business requirements and also stop/start it.

So for testing, I added one more policy to see how both the policies react. ISILON is intelligent enough to load balance both the policies as per their data size.

There is more to add to this post, but I would suggest referring the ISILON OneFS 7.1 Web guide or the CLI guide which gives more uses of SyncIQ and how we can customize the policies.

Implementing ISILON SMB Share on a new ISILON OneFS 7.1 ? Go through this

Phew!

This took ages for me to identify what was causing the new SMB / CIFS Share access issue through my other windows servers. Thanks to the EMC folks who gave some valuable suggestions on rectifying the issue.

https://community.emc.com/thread/191730

Here is the catch, tested in 7.1 virtual nodes, no AD:

 

In the user-defined access zone, use "lsa-local-provider:System"

for the LOCAL provider. Looks a bit weird, but works (for me).

 

One would expect enabling Guest (like in the KB article)

within the user-defined access zone should do it, but no luck with that so far.