Hi,

I have read on the forum, but am still a little confused if its ok if the VCM Device is not mapped with all the FAs.

Went through emc204637 and found the following paragraph:

• if the VCM gatekeeper is assigned to multiple fibre or iSCSI paths, you are therefore potentially sharing a write enabled volume between different hosts and different host types. This has caused data corruption and crashed hosts. (The impact depends on the host data/host label written to the VCMDB volume and the different host types involved.) If the VCM gatekeeper is assigned to multiple host paths, one avoidance is to manually set the assigned VCM gatekeeper volume write disabled on the fibre or iSCSI paths via Solutions Enabler commands* or via EMC Inlines commands. This avoidance does NOT affect device masking operations. However, this is not a permanent fix, as the volume may become write enabled on these paths again. Therefore, the Best Practice recommendation is never sharing the VCM or ACLX gatekeeper between multiple hosts and assigning only the VCM or ACLX gatekeeper volume to the Administration Host.

Does this mean that I should not mask the VCM with more than one Hosts [SAN Mgmt Hosts I guess] or more than on FA ? The term "path" is causing the confusion. The paragraph after that sound like its talking about hosts, but just wanted to be sure.

Also, if the VCM device is not mapped with all the FAs, and the only FA its mapped with goes down, what happens to the symmaskdb updates ?

The Primus also states that for DMX-3 and 5771 onwards it doesnt matter if the VCM is mapped to all the FAs or not, but what about say DMX1/2000 with 5671 ?

In the output below.

symcfg -sid 1234 -dir 4C -p 1 -v list |findstr "(SPC2) (SC3) (OS2007) (C) VCM"

    Device Masking (VCM) Config State    : Enabled

    VCMdb Access Restricted State        : Disabled

    Common_Serial_Number(C)      : Enabled

    SCSI_3(SC3)                  : Disabled

    SPC2_Protocol_Version(SPC2)  : Disabled

    SCSI_Support1(OS2007)        : Disabled

   VCM_State(VCM)               : Enabled

Does the second highlighted line is something I should worry about ? Does  VCMdb Access Restricted State        : Disabled indicate that VCM is not enabled in some way ?

Sorry for the barrage of questions, but would be thankful if someone could help.