The current version of EMC’s Unisphere for the VNX does not allow for more than one storage array to be present in a single “management domain”– meaning you cannot (today) manage multiple EMC arrays from a single Unisphere session on the VNX. Bummer. While this has been promised for a future release, it’s a known limitation today.

And generally speaking, it’s not a major issue, but rather a temporary inconvenience.

However, having more than one array in the storage or management domain has traditionally been a requirement of EMC’s SAN Copy and MirrorView array-based software solutions. And when migrating data from a prior generation EMC array (or even a non-EMC array) to the VNX, these tools (SAN Copy specifically) come in very handy.

The good news is that there are documented workarounds to use SAN Copy and MirrorView on the VNX. Here is the video for using the LUN’s “WWN” unique ID to create a SAN Copy session between a CX3-40 and a VNX 5500. I’ll post a separate video for MirrorView in a few days.

Also, make sure you know the ports that your array uses for SAN Copy / MirrorView, and (assuming a FC network) zone them appropriately. For example, on the VNX arrays used in the videos above, SP port “0″ are used for MirrorView, and SP port “1″ are used for SAN Copy. They CANNOT share the same SP port.