unconfigured space cannot be used !!

Question

Hi all,

I'm working with a Symmetrix DMX-3 which have 400GB of unconfigured capacity and more than 10 of the disks having more than 10GB of free space.

When I try to create a RAID-5 3+1 device of 20 GB, I assume that I need 4 hypers of about 7GB each, I get the message: "Could not find disks that satisfy our mirror/RAID policy"

Any idea what is the reason of that message?

bodnarg · Accepted Answer

Quickest way I can think is using SYMCLI on the specific device. Here is a sample showing that I have ~24GB free on the tail of this drive:

symdisk -sid XXX show 1a:c8 -gaps

...

Hypers (6):
{
# Vol Emulation Dev Type Mirror Status Cap(MB)
--- ---- ---------------- ---- ------------- ------ -------------- --------
1 247 FBA 0113 Data 1 Ready 11519
2 248 FBA 0133 Data 2 Ready 11519
3 249 FBA 0153 Data 1 Ready 5761
4 250 FBA 0173 Data 3 Ready 5761
5 251 FBA 0193 Data 1 Ready 5761
6 252 FBA 01B3 Data 3 Ready 5761
- - N/A - GAP - N/A 23925
}

bodnarg · Answer

Could be that the drives break some other redundancy rule other than capacity. Are the drives all on the same loop or something along those lines?

The other thing to watch is that perhaps the 10GB of free space is not contiguous on those drives?

ASB1 · Answer

The other thing to watch is that perhaps the 10GB offree space is not contiguous on those drives? I thought this could be the reason, but how can I check that?

Allen Ward · Answer

Besides, if you only have 400GB unconfigured you should be happy. I've got two arrays with almost 3TB unconfigured between them

dynamox · Answer

can't even slice it up into smaller symdevs and use it for some odd stuff like file servers, quorum drives ?

xe2sdc · Answer

I suspect you have a DMX3/4 (not either 3 or 4 .. but a DMX 3 quarters) However try configuring small 2-way mirror devices .. You should be able to use almost everything when you use mirror.

ASB1 · Answer

Thank you all for your helpful posts,

Allen Ward · Answer

Yes, I'm waiting until we go to 5772 (in the next month or so) and then I'm going to carve up the space into small mirrors to use for DSE. It's like free space

dynamox · Answer

what's DSE ?

Allen Ward · Answer

DSE is a feature tied in with Transmit Idle for SRDF/A that allows you to "survive" longer outages without the links dropping out of Async mode. The transmit Idle allows you to use additional cache to extend the session through a link outage and DSE lets you use pools of disk to extend it even more.

If you are running SRDF/A you should really check these out!

dynamox · Answer

i see ...we are running SRDF/S here .... is this pool visible from symcli or from the bin file only?

Allen Ward · Answer

It is 'user configurable', so you can see it from ECC, SMC, or SymCLI.But it won't do anything for you with SRDF/S (as far as I know). The configuration and workings of SRDF/S and SRDF/A are very different in that respect.

xe2sdc · Answer

Almost exactly what you said, with an italian accent

xe2sdc · Answer

DSE and TI are two different things.TI should be already enabled. EMC requires you to have TI on any SRDF/A group at any code starting with target 5771. TI will kick in when Link Limbo expires. TI will fill your cache with cycles waiting to be sent over RDF links.DSE uses disk to stage cycles that are already in cache and still waiting for the links to come up again. DSE will free your cache in case your links are still down and your cache is full. DSE will prevent your links from being dropped even in case of longer link disruption. DSE is available since code 5772.Message was edited by: Stefano Del Corno

Allen Ward · Answer

I understand what you are saying, but I have to disagree with the statement that "DSE and TI are two different things".

While they do things differently, DSE is definately an extension of what TI offers. DSE helps when you would have run out of capacity purely in the cache with TI.

Not trying to start an argument or anything, but I want to make sure anyone reading this thread understands that the two are closely linked.

Symmetrix

unconfigured space cannot be used !!

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