how to uninstall or disable FASTCacheEnabler

You need to use naviseccli

so something like

Naviseccli -user xxxxxx -password xxxxx -scope 0 -h SPIPaddress ndu -messner -uninstall -FASTCache -delay 360

So this will remove the enabler and wait 6 minutes (360 sec's) after the first SP to reboot comes back up

Now obviously if you have FASTCache configured in any shape or form this will fail.

If you are not comfortable doing this get an SR open with support

Also this will not give you your memory back, you will need to reset your cache size after the NDU, it will just give you free memory to reuse.

Now the flip side of this is normally FASTCache is awesome for performance and usage of it would normally negate the memory usage of it, so that could be another road to go down

Gearoid

Just as Gearoid mentioned, FAST Cache is a very good feature and I'm sure you will be able to find good candidate luns for using it. Tell your manager, it will save you a lot in terms of number of spindles/dollars. Also, since its a licensed product, you would've spent money getting this feature, so disabling it would be a loss in terms of both money and performance, just to gain a few MBs in SP cache.

Anyhow if you want to uninstall the enabler, then please destroy FAST Cache (if configured). Do it during non-peak IO period, as FAST Cache will destage data to disk based luns and will impact performance of the array. Once complete, enter the engineering mode (Ctrl+Shift+F12 and password is "messner"). Click on System Properties, go to the Software tab and uninstall the FAST Cache enabler. Please be very careful while using the engineering mode and immediately exit the engineering mode by pressing the key combo (Ctrl+Shift+F12).

The naviseccli command that Gearoid mentioned does the same thing in a less complicated and safer way.

Hello Ramu,

I strongly agree with Sushant’s Post.., I would recommend you to make use of this feature for better performance, FAST Cache uses Enterprise Flash Drives and helps with both read and write performance for frequently accessed data when this feature is enabled for a LUN (or LUNs), When enabled on LUNs composed of standard rotating hard disk drives, FAST Cache will automatically migrate frequently accessed data from the hard drives onto Flash drives for improved access times and higher I/O rates.. Please refer to the below mentioned document for more information on “VNX FAST Cache”…

https://support.emc.com/docu32136_White-Paper:-VNX-FAST-Cache-%E2%80%94-A-Detailed-Review.pdf?language=en_US

Regards,

Suman Pinnamaneni

Thank you all for your suggestions and the detailed description on how to uninstall FASTCache. the FASTCache is installed on VNX5300, I beleive they didn't buy any license to set up the FASTCahce. They just installed the enabler, other than that they didn't configure anything. if they had configured FASTCahce, i will suggest my manager that we shoud use that else i will suggest them the process you told me to uninstall it.

thanks geroid, sushanth and suman

Geroid,

should i do the uninstal for both the SP's or if i do it for SPA , will it uninstall FASTCach from the array?

i used that command and checked the info by typing get all. i didnt see FASTCache, but just wondering if should do it for both SPs or doing it for one SP will do the magic?

NDU's are SP agnostic

You can point it at one and it will run on both

So to verify that it did do it

do a

Naviseccli -user xxxxxx -password xxxxx -scope 0 -h SPIPaddress ndu -status

(this will return a status like succeeded/failed)

Also use

Naviseccli -user xxxxxx -password xxxxx -scope 0 -h SPIPaddress ndu -list 

To verify what enablers are installed on the array

You can do all this in the GUI too but yeah Im a cli man all the way

Gearoid    

thanks Gearoid.

this is very helful information. i think CLI is easier too.

Gearoid Griffin wrote: So this will remove the enabler and wait 6 minutes (360 sec's) after the first SP to reboot comes back up

I simply wanted to mention that uninstalling (or even installing) the FAST Cache enabler will (well... should) *not* reboot the SP's.  If you have the original enabler, the only absolute way of verifying this is to unzip the contents as follows:

1) Rename <enabler>.ena to <enabler>.zip

2) Unzip file using your tool of choice

3) View the file TOC.txt and search for the following lines:

VENDOR EMC

NAME EFDCacheEnabler

DISPLAYNAME -FASTCache

REVISION 01015.008

DISPLAYREV -

DESCRIPTION The FAST Cache enabler package

COMMIT_REQUIRED FALSE

SUITE_COMPLETE TRUE

INSTALL_REBOOT_REQUIRED FALSE

UPGRADE_REBOOT_REQUIRED FALSE

UNINSTALL_REBOOT_REQUIRED FALSE

POST_ACTIVATE_REQUIRED TRUE

HAS_POST_ACTIVATE_SCRIPT FALSE

There are many charts that have documented the list of the enablers and the reboot requirements (if any); however, it only takes a few seconds to verify on your own.  However, planning the activity as if it would reboot the SP's one at a time and performing it during a maintenance window may still be the prudent thing to do, but I bring it up as it isn't as important.

Thanks Chris. Really helpful information regarding enablers

Good piece of advice Christopher!

Thanks, this helped a lot!