VNXe Config Guide

Hi Smarti

The Following configuration is only for ISCSI Configuration, so if you give me more details on the number of ports and the SP RAM details that i can help you better.

As per the configurations till now that I have suggested customer these are the common details out of them.

1. Create 2 ISCSI servers one on each SP. 
2. Aggregate base ports on eth2 and eth3 on SP. 
3. Connect the SPA ports to switch A and SPB ports to switch B 
4. Create Lag group on Switch a with SPA ports only that is 2 ports in the same way create it on SPB. 
5. Make the identical configuration on Switch A and B ports. 
6. Enable fast ports on Switch A and B. 
7. Create equal amount of LUNs on each SP as per the requirement. 
8. Connect VMWare on switch A and B.

  Now start the load balancing part on VMWare. 

1. Before migrating the VM to VNXe make sure you make a list of VM sorted as per the IOPS. 
2. Then move all the even number of VMs to LUNs coming from SPA and Odd number of VM to SPB.

For a testing purpose reboot the following and check the access to LUNs:

Note: reboot the following component and wait for it to come up and then reboot the next on.

1. Switch A 
2. Switch B 
3. SPA 
4. SPB 
5. That’s all if all the tests are ok then your environment is setup perfectly.

If anything went wrong then I suggest then you can open a case with the VNXe technical support team to help you fixing the issue.

Thanks,

Rohan.

Rohan,

Thanks for the reply, just what I'm looking for.

In my particular case I have a VNX3300 with 4 built in ports and one addition a 4 port card in each SP. I haven't actually got my hands on one yet. The storage is 21 x 600GB drives in one Pool with 1 hot spare.

The customer needs iSCSI intially for Physical and then RDM for VMware once the physical servers are migrated to VMware.

They also need NFS for VMware.

They also need CIFs.

Are two ports the maximum you can create in a LACP channel on VNX3300 or can you have more? The documentation is unclear as it mentions Eth2 and another port only.

My thinking if it's two ports only is to combine eth2 and eth6, eth3 and eth7, eth4 and eth8, eth5 and eth9 to make 4 lacp channels. Each channel can be assigned to iscsi, cifs, nfs and replication if possible. This is repeated on SPB.

I would then create two iscsi servers, one on each SP. And also Shared folder servers on each SP for CIFs access and NFS access.

How would you assign a LUN to each SP. I can't see where you do this in the VNXe demo. Would I have to create a seperate pool and access one pool via SPA and one Pool via SPB?

Thanks for your help.

There is another White Paper that provides an overview of high availability best pactices> It is available here:

EMC VNXe High Availability - Overview

Thanks Mikheff.

Unfortunately that HA paper seems to be EMC internal only. As a partner  where can I get access?

Mikheff,

The paper "Replicating VNXe iSCSI to VNX using Replication Manager 5.3.2 — Technical Notes" seems to have an error in the Appendix.

Where it has the iscsi server address IP1 on SPB I think that address should be 192.168.1.111. As thats the same as the shared folder address.

Was confusing me for a while!

How do you report things like that?

Thanks for the links.

Thats correct.

Hi Smarti,

I think you are talking about this page 138.

Thanks,

Rohan

Thanks for the feedback Smarti.

I can make sure that this is corrected in the documentation.

FYI, a moderator for this thread is in the process of posting the VNXe HA Overview document to this forum.

Thats great,

I cannot save this document for future reference. Please remove the restriction

Joseph