Automation and IT Service Management are big interest points for me this year. VMAXe and VPlex integrations and best practices also are in scope for me this year. To top it all off I plan to spend as much time in the hands on labs as possible.

If you see me out there feel free to chat me up on topics of interest. I still need to find out if there is a bloggers lounge and take care of some last minute scheduling.

See you there!

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Here is an easy way to find your trespassed lun’s on Clariion.

naviseccli -h 10.1.1.161 -getlun trespass

The output is as follows on my test array:
LOGICAL UNIT NUMBER 37
Default Owner: SP A
Current owner: SP B

LOGICAL UNIT NUMBER 25
Default Owner: SP B
Current owner: SP A

You can use this command to trespass a single lun.

naviseccli -h 10.1.1.161 trespass lun 37

This will return you to the command prompt when finished. So run the getlun command again to see if the lun is still trespassed.

If you have a lot of luns to trespass you can use the following command on both storage processor ip’s

naviseccli -h 10.1.1.161 trespass mine
naviseccli -h 10.1.1.162 trespass mine

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EMC World has ended and I am on a plane thinking about Ionix UIM. This is a product that appears to be geared towards configuration of vBlock. I’m interested in answering some questions for myself. I am curious if I can automate the provisioning of new blades as they arrive at my location. I am also interested in automating the provisioning of new chassis as they are plugged into my UCS fabric interconnects.i am interested in automating the full provisioning and configuration of ESXi. Tis could help me move a long the path of getting out of the server provisioning business.

Currently provisioning a new blade is extremely easy with UCS. I said easy not instant, fast, or man power free. Unpack and slide in sounds great and not worrying after this point sounds great. Minutes to a couple of hours later have VM’s start vMotioning to it would be awesome.

Today we have to log into UCS and assign a service profile. Then we zone it in the brocade switches and assign a boot LUN in unisphere. Now we boot it and mount an iso to install ESXi. Then we add the rest of the storage to it that is our normal datastores. Assign a host profile that never seems to be perfect and configure the network. Near this point some final tweaks and we have VM’s on it. A process that seems to take us a couple of days at best.

I do not think UIM is going to support brocade but it might. In he help file I saw only mention of MDS. I bet it does support nexus though. I’ll get this questions answered soon enough. The lab the product seem simple from a functionality point of view but it did meet a key piece of strategy to remove manual process and replace with automation. It also appeared to fill a gap in physical capacity reporting in a single pane though not as good as I want. I would love to see integration with capacity iq to show true capacity including virtual capacity.

All in all UIM is something I plan to look at further.

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The demo I saw on Monday referenced a use case at Amazon where 16 billion rows needed to be sliced and diced providing useful data to marketing and executives. For instance you could look at all purchases for the past 5 years where someone bought a DVD player and then did not buy any dvd’s in the last 12 months. Then send them an email with some DVD sales or some other DVD related marketing. The wow factor? The results came back in less than a second. The special sauce? 768 GB of cache.

The box is currently sold in 1/4, 1/2, and whole cabinet configurations. It does support some nice features which I will continue to investigate and see if the technology can apply to the challenges my company experiences.

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The miles of walking between sessions, solution pavilion, vlabs, and the hotel have given me various surfaces to experience nearly barefoot. The cushy carpet in the vlab was weird at first, as was the extremely firm surface of the marble near the Blue Man Group. My feet have throughly enjoyed being cool and dry in the Las Vegas weather. Typically all of the walking takes its toll, however so far this year I seem to be quite comfortable.

I was a bit worried that the look would be too much. They are, after all, a bright yellow shoe. Worn with blue jeans and a vendor polo they honestly seem to blend in. I was really surprised at just how many people honestly seemed to like them. A few even knew someone else who had a pair.

I planned to go the entire conference with them and at this point I see no reason I will not accomplish this. EMC World 2011 faux barefoot!

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Information vs Data – Information is good. More information means more business. The bad is the cost to store data. Data is information captured. The goal is to always store the information in the most efficient way possible. – I agree with this on some levels but there are other goals that go with this.

The hardware data capacity is not keeping up. HDD density is only going to be 36x in 2020. While Data is going to be 124x. Compute is going to be 103x. So we need more compute resources and way more hdd’s to keep up with data growth over the next 9 years. Oh and the budget is only going to be 2x.

The 3 dimensions of storage efficiency is simplicity, efficiency and performance. I’ve experienced the issue of looking only at $ per GB and GB per sqft etc etc. Performance then came around to being the most important. $ per io, io per sqft, etc etc. While maintaining a good position of the 3 dimensions.

The first stage in the journey to the cloud is Simplicity. Number of VM’s growing quickly. Just now starting vm deployments.
The second stage is large volume of tier 3 vm’s. Utility type stuff over in the efficiency area.
The 3rd stage is performance when we put the tier 1 in. Cost is the last thing we should worry about because best performance is what is needed. This is where we were in 2010.

The next generation unified storage is VNX and VNXe. The big boy is the 7500. The smallest is the VNXe3100. – My initial information on VNX makes it sound like it solves all of my NS-960 woes.

The where’s waldo slide fits us perfectly. We play the 3 card monte with storage. Where’s the bits where’s the bits. The bits are here the bits are there. Where’s the bits where’s the bits. Constantly moving stuff around to make the pieces fall into place. Capacity optimization!

By 2012, 80% of all storage capacity sold will be for file-based data. If I keep assigning storage to Celerra like I have been then I agree. Most of our data these days is VMWare Datastores and Celerra NFS/CIFS mounts.

Backup storage is roughly 5x-10x production data. I agree with this. We showed that with Recoverpoint and DataDomain and Tivoli we have many xGB for 1 GB.

VM Storage is only 1/1200 of the enterprise data? I disagree with this. Of course my company is around 99% virtualized. We have about 50% of our data in Datastores and about 50% in NFS/CIFS on Celerra.

AS all of this data growth occurs IT starts to ask the business “do you need to store that” We should ask “Should we store that like this?”.

To reduce production data, compression at file and block level provides 40-50% typical savings. File level dedup typically around 10%. Block level between 20-28%. VNX uses the first 2 types.

CPU to HDD peformance gap – CPU improves 100 times every decade – disk speed hasn’t. The solution is FLASH.

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EMC World 2011 is well underway here in Las Vegas at the Venetian convention center.

I will be posting notes and information I am able to gather and share from the sessions and speakers.

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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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