"...their vision has been instrumental in our adoption of these technologies before they become buzzwords." - Network Manager at Nelson Mullins
"I would simply say that they do the work you need and do it very well." - Director of IT at Piedmont Healthcare
"Not only are the eGroup engineers extremely good, they have all been able to fit in with my existing staff and build relationships that are beneficial for all of our projects." - VP and CIO, Beaufort Memorial Hospital
We called around to other companies to see who they used and over and over the name eGroup was given. After the first meeting, I knew they had the knowledge and staff to meet our needs." - IT Director, MCAngus, Goudelocke and Courie
"I was skeptical about the amount of work they wanted to do in a short amount of time. But we were able to get it all accomplished in less time than they expected. Totally blew us away." - IT Manager, Horry Electric Cooperative
"With their expertise at our disposal, it is like having additional staff on hand. They have never made us feel like we were just another client. More like colleagues." - IT Manager, Horry Electric Cooperative
EMC recently announced VSI 5.2 for vSphere. From comments I’ve heard, this seem to be a underutilized FREE utility from EMC that can help simplify managing storage environments that support vSphere. The software is now on revision 9 for those of you who like “others” to “work out the bugs”.
For VNXe customers, EMC VSI 5.2 now utilizes the EMC VNXe Advanced Storage Access feature to support cloning and compression of NFS datastores.
For VDI customers EMC VSI 5.2 integrates with VMware View and Citrix Xendesktop providing simplified storage management for those complex environments.
More features, enhancements and fixes are outlined in Power Link. From the home page navigate to the following:
Home > Support > Technical Documentation and Advisories > Software ~ T-Z ~ Documentation > Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) > Virtual Storage Integrator for vSphere >
This tool is definitely worth trying out and keeping up with as it continues to add features.
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.
As a result of the huge success of EMC’s VNX platform, the need for data migrations has grown, especially recently, to get customer’s data safely and easily moved over from their previous storage platform to their shiny new VNX. Here are some ideas on migration strategies that hopefully help you in the planning or execution of data migrations! Keep in mind that almost every one of our customers are heavily virtualized, the vast majority of which run VMware vSphere– so it is in that context that the following “strategies” are presented.
The “strategies” listed below are NOT exclusive of one another– in fact, we commonly use a combination of all 3 to provide a “total solution”. And there are some other strategies and techniques used to aid in the migration of data that aren’t covered that work just fine.
“Strategy” 1
First and foremost, the BEST and EASIEST data migration of all can be done without any downtime, and with zero risk. This is accomplished by using Storage vMotion (svMotion), and means you are migrating over some of your virtual environment to the VNX. It requires that your data exists in a VMDK (meaning it’s a virtual machine and that drive is NOT an RDM), and that you’ve created and presented storage from the VNX to the vSphere environment. This method works like a charm!
Here is a list of the different kinds of “private RAID groups” that are created as part of a storage pool “behind the scenes” depending on the number of similar drives within the pool”.
I found during my last code update with a VNX 5300 that after the upgrade to the latest code, all the wizards upper the File System Configuration were grayed out.
Troubleshooting looked like the code upgrade went bad, but in actuality, it was just the user permissions were corrupted on the sysadmin user. To fix the issue, simply create a new user that has the administrator role assigned to them, log in with that user, and then delete and recreate the sysadmin user.
This fixes the issues and brings you back to using the sysadmin user.
