Total ---------- ---------- --- ---------- --- ---------- ---
GBs 272.0 192.0 0 192.0 0 192.0 0
If a device is unbound from a pool, say SATA, and then rebound to FC, the data will remain intact, but the *extents* will also remain on SATA. Upon writing new extents, these will be written to the FC pool, but reading extents that are already on SATA will not change them. The 2 ways that I know to bind a device to a new pool are:
Unbind and Rebind to a new pool -> Existing extents remain on original pool, new extents are written to new pool.
- Is there a way to do this without it becoming offline to the host? (presumably I cannot unbind a device while it is in a Masking View? or can I??).
- If an existing extent is written do (a single btye say) will that whole extent be moved up to the FC pool, or will it remain on SATA ?
symmigrate to a new pool -> All extents will be migrated up to the new pool (I know that this is online and non-disruptive, so that's good)
With the above options in mind (i.e. a device can be bound to FC, but have a distribution of extents on FC or on SATA, or on other pools at the same time), is there a command that can show me the distribution of extents for a device?
i.e. in the above, if device 879 had been unbound and moved up to the FC pool, 100% of it's extents would remain on SATA until specific extents are written at which time they will be moved to FC; it would be useful to be able to see that?
What is the general impact to host performance when symmigrate'ing between pools. Is it high, or is generally run as a background process with low impact to the host (i.e. host operations are given a much higher priority etc) ?
Is it safe to 'terminate' a running symmigrate, leaving half of the extents on SATA and half on FC say ?
What is the difference between Pool Allocated and Total Written ? My guess is that pool allocated is all the extents that are in use while Total Written are all the non-zero extents with actual data, though I'm a bit unclear.
What is Compressed Size/Ratio ? I see from some outputs that this can be higher than the Pool Allocated / Total Written (i.e. negative compression ratio which doesn't seem good). Is compression something we turn on/off (if so, where/how) and can manage, or is this globally on/off per array, and what is it's use (going by the above, it's not good) ?
symmigrate (VLUN) is generally a lower priority task; it will actually stop migrating extents in certain situations... for example, when system write pendings (basically dirty write cache pages) reach a certain level.
Yes, for thin symmigrate sessions, it is safe to terminate prior to completion. In this case, extents will remain where they are at the time of termination (e.g. half in SATA and half in FC, as you mentioned).
Pool Allocated includes both written and preallocated extents, and Pool Written just accounts for extents that have actually been written to by a host. For preallocated TDEVs, you'll likely see a higher value for Pool Allocated than Pool Written.
Compression is an option of FAST VP where we can optionally compress data that hasn't been accessed in a user-defined period of time. It's only relevant if you're using FAST VP and have explicitly enabled compression. Assuming you're not using FAST VP & Compression, the cases where you're seeing unusual values in the Compression column may just be rounding errors. When displaying capacity in GB, the Pool Allocated column displays in integers (no decimal point), and the Compressed Size (and Pool Written) column displays with a single digit after the decimal point. To confirm, you could try dropping the -gb flag so it displays capacity in tracks instead of GB.
So, I ran it again this morning and the symmigrate session went to 100% but again some devices have 1008 or 1020 left on the SATA pool. Any ideas why I cannot push all data to FC exclusively? (Maybe I should open a support case, but good to talk these things on forums, where others can see these openly and compare experiences I was thinking).
This sounds like a known issue -- documented at https://support.emc.com/kb/169241. I'd recommend opening an SR -- support can confirm whether or not you're running into this issue, and if so can apply an Enginuity fix to resolve it.
seancummins
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226 Posts
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Posted June 22nd, 2014 06:00
Hi Rwise,
You can nondisruptively rebind a device to a different pool without first unbinding it.
Rewriting data to an existing extent will not cause that extent to be moved.
To see the distribution of capacity/extents for your devices, just add the -detail flag to the original command you pasted above.
Thanks,
- Sean