EMC has a long track record of providing excellent tools to manage their products. Navicli is an example of a product that is included with your Clariion. EMC maintains up to date versions for any platform you can imagine, aix, linux, hpux, windows, vmware, etc. This tool allows you to perform many commands on your Clariion platform. EMC released some new technology called F.A.S.T which stands for Fully Automated Storage Tiering. This is really a bundle of 3 tools and is called F.A.S.T. V1.

The 3 tools are Navi Analyzer, Navisphere QoS, and Fast LUN Migrator. Let’s think about this for a bit. Everyone should already have Navi Analyzer. I always purchase it for my arrays. I also already own QoS. Now I am forced to buy them again to get the new tool Fast LUN Migrator. The reason for this? FLM requires .nar files to work! It cannot function with .naz files which you can always generate without Navi Analyzer. Rather than release the ability for you to analyzer .naz files with their tool and restrict you from actually opening them with an analyzer interface they force you to buy navi analyzer. I have yet to see why you actually need QoS as it is not used by Analyzer or FLM. It appears this is just an extra. The price for the suite you ask? You could buy a giant nexus one phone instead.

The installation of FLM is only 64MB, almost 1$ per byte. None of this is adding up to value for me yet. Let’s look at what FLM actually does for us. We already know what Analyzer and QoS brings to the table, the mystery is this new tool that we have to pay so much for.

FLM is a command line tool for windows. Here is how it works.
1. You download a nar file from your array.
2. You run fastlunmigrator.exe lunanalyze narfile.nar
3. You open a csv file and type in destination raid groups for the luns that are recommended to move.
4. You run fastlunmigrator.exe lunassist -h ipaddr -user adminuser -password adminpass -scope 0 -file narfileout.csv
5. You wait for the lun to migrate to the destination raid group. You can check status with fastlunmigrator.exe -status -h ipaddr -user adminuser -password adminpass -scope 0
6. Once it says complete for step 5 above, you are done.

Now what actually happened in step 1. Well you used analyzer to get the nar file if you did not own analyzer you would get a naz file. In step 2 the FLM product looked for luns with over 70% utilization or an average busy queue length of greater than 5 or a response time over 30 ms. If it finds one then it reports in the csv that it needs to move to faster disk type. In step 3 you MANUALLY choose raid groups and type them into the csv so that FLM knows where to move the source lun to. In step 4 FLM is creating a new lun of the proper size in the destination raid group, this is the destination lun. It then does a lun migration to this lun from the source lun. Step 5 is just a textual report of migration summary.

Now all of this can simply be scripted. Many shops may already even have this scripted. This Fast LUN Migrator tool should be free. The real power is analyzer. It is the one that is providing all of the data. Everything else can be done in Clariion manually. In fact you would likely do lun migrations one at a time anyways. Could you imagine if NaviCLI was a paid for product?

Now EMC has announced that F.A.S.T. v2 is coming out. This is sub lun tiering and sounds very interesting. There are some articles on the internet that mention EMC may be behind the curve here since some of their competition already have very similar features. F.A.S.T v2 and Flash Cache will be two emerging paid for features for Clariion to keep an eye on. Oh did I mention F.A.S.T. v2 is not an upgrade to F.A.S.T. in the sense you get it with your maintenance. No, F.A.S.T. v2 is a PAID for in addition to F.A.S.T. v1. They are going to hit you twice, that’s right folks.

EMC,
You have made a mistake here in charging for Fast LUN Migrator. This product should be free. I wasn’t overly surprised you charged for it at first because I thought it did more. At first I thought it would be sub $10,000. To find it is almost 6 times that list price is shocking. I keep looking for what you think is worth so much and I do plan to investigate more. Charge for F.A.S.T. v2 not v1.

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An easy way to find WWNN of a Clariion LUN inside of ESX.

esxcfg-mpath -lv | grep ^Disk | grep -v vmhba0 | awk '{print $3,$5,$2}' | cut -b15-

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VMware Consolidated Backup is going to continue to mature into a great solution for backing up VM’s. Some of the early adopters may have experienced problems with centralized storage. If you have more than one path to your centralized storage it has been recommended in VMWare’s documentation that you disable all inactive paths. This to me does not seem acceptable as part of the reason you paid for your highly available storage was for it to be “HIGHLY AVAILABLE”. This was a big issue for me.

VMWare VCB 1.1.0 apparently works fine with PowerPath. I have configured this and I am currently backing up about 20 guests. I am using Windows 2003 SP2 and PowerPath 5.1.0. The version of VCB I am using is exactly VMware-vcb-64559. I am also using Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5.0.4

I am unsure if VCB and PowerPath are officially supported yet. I am unable to find any documentation on VMWare’s site that says it is supported. I am also unable to find anything in release notes or the forums. It was recommended to me by vmware support to see if it resolved a disk access issue we seemed to randomly be having. I’m happy to say that after installing PowerPath I am able to backup all of my vm’s I have in vmlist so far. I would try it in a lab environment for a bit. I’d be interested to hear if it works for anyone else.

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