VNX 5300 SAS Cabling

What type of drives do you have in each enclosure (i.e. dae1=15x300GB SAS, dae2=15x2tb, etc.)?

After reading kelleg's post I asked the engineer about spreading the EFD's across both busses, because the 5 drives were in one enclosure.

He said that we were going to rearrange the drives.

In the first po we received 5 100 EFD, 30 600GB 15K Drives, 30 2TB NL SAS

In the second po 5 200 EFD's, 15 600GB 15k, 10 2 TB 7200k

We also wanted a tier0 not just fast cache.

We don’t have the second layout yet, but we do know the 200 EFD's are for fast cache and 100 EFD's for tier0.

This is the first layout.

I changed cabling from the VNX5300 System Installation Guide Page 26 VNX5300 SAS cabling.

What is the best way to change enclosure's id with out starting the install.

Power up just enclosures and not the dpe or does it matter?

Not sure why it came cabled that way.

Do you know where that is documented? So I can bring it up with the engineer.

Now is the time to do it the best way, before we migrate from the CX4.

you feel comfortable putting 2TB NL-SAS in RAID-5 pool config ?  We got a little extra SAS so that we put NL-SAS in its own RAID-6 pool for NAS only. I am hoping that one day we will be able to put different raid types in one pool. I can't afford to put SAS/FLASH in RAID-6 pool.

it should be somewhere in here

https://community.emc.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/554070-28204/h8268-vnx-block-best-practices.pdf

right now you can't mix different raid types in one pool.  I personally don't feel comfortable putting 2TB drives in a 4+1 pool, these fat drives will hold so much data, they are so slow ..i am afraid of double drive failure and considering in a pool scenario so much data is spread all over the place. Bring up this concern, maybe i am too over-cautious.

I thought the data that hasn't been accessed in a period of time would be demoted to lowest tier and compressed.

And the highest access would be promoted to the top tier.

So go with a 2 tired pool of efd and 15k drives, then a pool of the slow nl sas at raid6.

A single pool would slow down the pool's performance because of slow nl sas.

Right now, with your current setup, you have 2 DAEs on BE (back end) 0 and 3 DAEs on BE 1. That's pretty good distribution. One thing to think about is putting the NL SAS drives on it's own BUS and the other drives on the other BUS.

NL SAS -> those drives are mostly used for large block IO. SAS drives -> small block IO. This might be overkill especially on the 5300 since you only have two buses but something that you might want to consider.

If you want to change the BUS number on a DAE that is not configured then all you have to do is power that DAE off, recable it and power it back on. But like I said at the beginning, your distribution is OK. When you add another DAE make sure you connect it to BE 0.

that's the idea behind FAST, putting the right data on the right tier at the right time (i've seen too many FAST webex presentations ). Having NL-SAS would not slow down your performance because data that gets placed there is "cold" I thing it's great but the fact that you have to have the same raid configuration in your pool deters me from putting NL-SAS in there. While i have my "cold" data on the slow NL-SAS, that does not make that data less important. I am in the same boat as you are, i got around 200 15k SAS, 20 something 200G EFDs and a few dozen NL-SAS.  I am going to go with one R5 pool with EFDs, SAS and then another R6 pool for NAS only and a couple drives for FAST Cache.

Thanks for the information, and I will bring it up to the engineer.

The install starts tuesday and I want to be ready.