Hyper and meta size

Question

Hi, Sorry if this is in the wrong place. I wanted to put it in the Symmetrix Community but it wouldn't let me: it shows a no-entry sign :-( I would be interested to know about how you carve up your disks into hypers and how you use meta LUNs. Where I work, there are hypers mostly of just under 17 GB, both raid 1 and raid 5. There are also some smaller ones of 400 MB for things like quorum disks. (I am ignoring here things like gatekeepers, SFS, VLT, VCM, ...) Where I have worked previously, we had basic hypers of 15 GB or 11 GB. All these sizes seem very reasonable to me. As disks get bigger, is it reasonable to use bigger hypers? The bigger the basic unit, the more I/O will be performed on it so presumably the performance will go down as you lose out on the advantage of any striping. For metas, that is the maximum number of members you would use? I would not like to use more than half the total number of DA ports the disks are seen by (presuming half will be accessed via each fabric). So, if the disks are seen by say 32 DA ports, half on directors (in the range) 1 to 8 the other half on directors 9 to 16, I would not use more than 16 members in a meta. Thus the maximum LUN size I would provide is DAports/2 * hyper_size. What do you do when you're asked for a single LUN bigger than that? Do you always use 2**n members in metas (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, ...)? Thanks for your opinions. Alastair

NKW1 · Answer

I'll look into getting your question posted to the right community.  In the meantime, welcome, and let us know how you found out about the Proven Community. Are you an EMC Proven Professional or considering pursuing certification?

Alastair_A · Answer

Hello again,

Yes, I am EMC certified to the Specialist level and have participated twice in the Knowledge Sharing Competition. I was sent an email asking me to join in to this forum.

I think this site could be very useful. I was surprised I couldn't open a discussion in the Symmetrix group.

Thanks for your help,

Alastair

NKW1 · Answer

The Symmetrix developer community contains a link for folks to contact the EMC Developer Network team. Your question may be more of a system administration question, in which case you could try EMC's Support Forums ("Interactive message boards for sharing knowledge and questions about EMC technologies. Learn from other EMC users from around the globe and share your own experiences") (Powerlink/Support/Support Forums).

We encourage our Community members to ask questions specific to EMC Proven Professional training and certification and to discuss industry challenges. We will direct people to other communities and support forums as appropriate to find answeers to technology-specific questions.

Have you used the Support Forums in the past? What has been your experience?

PS. Congratulations on participating in Knowledge Sharing 2 times. We look forward to having Knoweldge Sharing authors share their papers in this community.

minksg · Answer

Hi Alastair! Welcome to the community!!What were your Knowledge Sharing papers about? I am guessing they have something to do with Symmetrix.

Alastair_A · Answer

Hi Gina,

The first paper talked about the importance of being organised when managing a SAN and storage by, for example, having a consistent naming convention and best practices and how these enables tools to be used easily to ensure a healthy SAN and help in everyday activities.

The second paper was specific to the Symmetrix and described how to generate "LUN maps" showing information on all servers, LUNs and FA ports as an Excel spreadsheet, again with the aim of helping administration and ensuring a "clean" Symm.

Alastair

Alastair_A · Answer

Hi Nada,

Thanks for your tip concerning the Support Forums. I have placed my questions there and got a reply.

I have used Powerlink for years but never before posted a question.

So, if I understand right, this forum is for training and certification only. Sorry for the mistake.

Sudeesh · Answer

Hi Alastair,

I know that I am very late to come into this post. In case you happen to see this. Please reply. I found that you have 2 papers mentioned above. Could I get them. I am an administrator in a bank in qatar. I have lost of data collection to be done in the storage in my bank. VMAX, DMX4, Clariion and Celerra are the storages used here.

Could you suggest me some idea to collect the detailed LUN list from each storage a create excel sheet. I have been doing it manually. If face a lot of hiccups.

Sudeesh

Jill_M · Answer

Hi Sudeesh,

Sorry to hear you are having problems! If you hold a Proven Professional certification, you can access Knowledge Sharing articles from past years in this thread in the Proven Professionals Only section of the community. Or, if you have an EMC Powerlink account, you can access the articles here.

You may also want to check out the Support Forums Community for additional help and answers to your questions.

Best of luck!

Jill

Sudeesh · Answer

Thank you Very much Jill.

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