VNX Pool configuraiton for File

good, that was just an example. I am trying to understand if pool construct is as important to Celerra as raid group layout was.

Thanks

Technically speaking - Yes. You can go ahead, create a pool from 7 drives (against the best practices), create pool LUNs and assign it to the ~filestorage storage group. Once you rescan the disks, you should be able to use the dvols on the file side. But as mentioned earlier, it would be against the best practices to create a small pool from 7 drives.

Hmm, here is my issue with this. For years i had to make sure raid groups were setup in Celerra-friendly fashion but at least then i would rely on AVM for slicing and dicing. Now i can drop drives into a pool in pretty much any manner but i would have to deal with manual volume manager ? This is essentially making provisioning on Celerra more complicated, error prone than before. I want to create a pool and then let AVM take care of slicing/dicing ?  I want to have my cake and eat it too.

>I am trying to understand if pool construct is as important to Celerra as raid group layout was.

This is a much better question than your original.  The answer is an unqualified, "Yes".

Remember, I'm a 'block-guy', but briefly you'd want to structure the pool like this:

Pool: You would want to create a separate homogeneous pool of 25 or more drives.  The more drives the better.

LUNs: The LUNs in the pool would all be thick. Create one thick LUN per physical drive. All the LUNs would be equal capacity and consume the entire capacity of the pool.  Divide the ownership of the LUNs equally between SPs.

Stripes: Use stripping as the aggegattion method to combine the thick LUNs into a file system.  The stripes should be five LUNs wide.  The stripe size should be 256 KiB.  Alternate the ownership of the LUNs in the stripe.  Alternate the ownership of the first LUN in each stripe across stripes ((A,B,A,B,A)(B,A,B,A,B)).

Slices: Create slice volumes from the stripe volumes to get the file system capacity to your needs.

Stripe Volumes: Manually create stripe volumes.  Add stripes to the user-defined pool with nas_pool. Use AVM to slice the pool.

However, remember that currently, traditional LUNs are the recommended way to implement File on VNX.

hehe..i appreciate the humor John .  I am looking for simplicity and consistency, manual volume management is not going to work in my environment. Grrr..back to traditional RGs i guess.

Recall my caveat, about currently traditional LUNs are the recommended way to implement file.

I assumed, that your question was from an experienced 'file-guy', with lots of time on his hands, and lots of idle intellectual curiosity on how one might implement File on top of a VNX virtual pools.

One might assume (note the italics) that in the future, he will be 'eating his cake'.  

Log in to PowerLink and search for: NAS Support Matrix

This is the direct link (hopefully it works): https://powerlink.emc.com/nsepn/webapps/btg548664833igtcuup4826/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/Interoperability_Matrix/NASSupportMatrix.pdf?mtcs=ZXZlbnRUeXBlPUttQ2xpY2tTZWFyY2hSZXN1bHRzRXZlbnQsZG9jdW1lbnRJZD0wOTAxNDA2NjgwNWNkODE1LGRhdGFTb3VyY2U9RENUTV9lbl9VU18w

The template cares about the location of drives. In other words, if you go and run the template the drives need to be next to each other (i.e. for a 4+2 you need 6 consecutive drives in the DAE). However, and someone can correct me if I'm wrong, if you are creating the RG in Unisphere it shouldn't matter where those drives are since you are creating the RG manually and not through the template. As long as the underlying RG is supported by Celerra (4+2, 12+2, etc.) you should be good to go.

Thanks Ernes, where did you find this documented ? Do you know if exact placement in the DAE still important ? For example 4+2, can these drives be in any slot of my DAE ?

do i use the same "template" for NL drives as i did for regular SATA ?

See attached image for supported configurations on the VNX

Just for some clarification, the raid group configuration, disk placement, etc is not relevant if you are going to use storage pools for the file side. With pool LUNs, the VNX file side will support any RAID configuration that is valid for the pool. From a user perspective, if you are creating a pool the RAID Groups that gets created is private and you have no visibility into how those are arranged.

So, here are the steps when you are using pools for creating LUNs and providing it to the file side:

1. Take a bunch of drives and create a pool.

2. Create pool LUNs.

3. Add it to the ~filestorage storage group and rescan the file side.

The LUNs then become available for the file side.

Thanks for the confirmation Avi.

thank you everybody

Ernes,

do you have partner access to PowerLink ? I am getting access denied when i try to follow the link.

Thanks

i did, also looked in E-lab under interop guide ..nothing, odd that this would be confidential.