Not, if you want to destroy something, please delete the whole array from ECC and rediscover it again (shutdown/startup Symmetrix agent). But I think you'll have to open a SR since it's a very strange problem and I didn't find primus solution that even talsk about duplicated symdevs. I think it's simply a problem with ECC since I think it's impossible to have a duplicated symdev inside the box.

You can't choose the range of devices that will be created with either symcli or ECC. And SMC is the same

Can you collect the symapi logs on the host that is running the Symmetrix agent and that actually issued the commands against the storage ??

Michael I know little if nothing about ECC .. But in my experience when you delete symdevs with ECC, it will delete the corresponding entries in its repository. And when you create symdevs it will add the new devices to the repository.

However (since you can issue symcli commands that may render the repository "out of sync") ECC will discover the boxes every midnight and update ECC database accordingly. The only steps that may drive you to this result (ECC complaining due to duplicated symdevs) may be that someone deleted some devices between the last automatic discovery (at midnight) and the actual device creation. ECC believed that dev 1093 was still in the box (since it was still there at last automatic discovery) but when Not created the devices the symdev 1093 was "free" (as you noted) and symwin "reused" it.

I don't think it's an issue with the box. I think that ECC is fooled by something.. That's why I suggested to delete the whole array from ECC and re-discover it again ..

Hello All,

This is speculation but when you perform an online volume deletion the old original Symmetrix Volume numbers are retained in the Symmetrix bin file as "null devices".

When you subsequently re-add "new" logical volumes these "old" Symmetrix Volume numbers are "re-used" by SymmWin by default.

The new volumes size, emulation, physical location on the backend, etc, are totally different but the old Symm Vol # has been recycled.

I don't know if this is the case here (and I don't know how ECC addresses previously deletd volumes).

Again just 2-cents worth - back to you Stefano.

Regards,
Michael.

Hello Stefano,

Thanks for that insight. To my mind an online volume deletion and online volume addition may have been a way of "fooling" ECC since (as you already stated earlier) you cannot create logical volumes in the Symmetrix with duplicate volume numbers.

Regards,
Michael.

After I rebooted the ECC server the issue went away. I think the problem was created because I deleted the devices then recreated new ones with the same exact settings within minutes of each other.

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Not forgive me .. But did you delete the devices using ECC ?? Or did you delete the devices using symcli ??

I had a similar issue a few months ago and I did not delete the new devices at all. We didn't reboot the ECC hosts as well. The issue went away by itself.

I must add the following: ECC mentioned that there were double numbers, but the old ones were deleted a few hours or a day or so before I created the new ones. The new devices got numbers like "2E45 (1)", "2E46 (1)"... Looks like a Windows problem
And like I said: the problem went away by itself.

I did everything via ECC

"Not" as you can see in RRR's post, it looks like a transient problem that goes away by itself.