Our company purchased a new VNX5300 and we are looking at changing our CX3-10 into a CIFS Server. There isn't any data on the SAN but it does have left over configuration settings. I have documentation on how to create a CIFS server but that is without any configuration (RAID, Storage Groups, etc) already in place. Do I destroy the remote mirrors, consistency groups, storage groups and finally RAID groups and then recreate what I need? Is the order listed the best order to perform this task? I haven't been able to find any documentation on my situation.
Step 1: fracture the remote mirrors and then destroy them
Step 2: go to the RLP (Reserve LUN Pool) and remove all the LUNs from it. Right-click on the array in Navisphere, go to Snapview and you'll see the reserve LUN pool option there
Step 3: remove LUNs 10 and 11 from the VMware storage group
Step 4: go to RAID Groups in Navisphere and destroy all the LUNs. Do not destroy the hot spare RAID Groups, you can leave those intact
Step 5 (optional): destroy all the RAID Group. You only have to do this if you want to re-configure the RAID Groups; in other words, chage the # of drives in a RAID Group, etc.
"CX3-10 is attached to a data mover which, in turn, is connected to various switches" - are these fibre switches or network switches? If you are using the term data mover then that means that you have a NAS gateway or possibly an integrated array.
Our CX3-10 is attached to a data mover which, in turn, is connected to various switches. These switches also have our ESXi hosts attached to them. My hope is to leave the connections intact and simply convert the data storage into a CIFS server.
Please bear with me as I am learning this on the fly.
It doesn't look like you have NAS. So you are probably using iSCSI off of the SP's on the CX3-10 to access the storage.
In order for you to deploy a CIFS server you will need to create a VM and use that as your CIFS server. You cannot create a CIFS server on the CX3-10 since it doesn't have NAS capabilities.
So back to your original question. You can create another LUN (if you have capacity), assign that LUN to your ESX servers and use it for CIFS storage. I see in the above screenshot that you have two LUN, LUN 10 and 11. Do you want to preserve the data on LUNs 10 and 11? If so, how are you using those two LUNs; are the VMFS datastores and do you have VMs on those two LUNs or are they MirrorView target LUNs?
etaljic81
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Posted August 29th, 2012 09:00
I see, ok. So you need to start from bottom up.
Step 1: fracture the remote mirrors and then destroy them
Step 2: go to the RLP (Reserve LUN Pool) and remove all the LUNs from it. Right-click on the array in Navisphere, go to Snapview and you'll see the reserve LUN pool option there
Step 3: remove LUNs 10 and 11 from the VMware storage group
Step 4: go to RAID Groups in Navisphere and destroy all the LUNs. Do not destroy the hot spare RAID Groups, you can leave those intact
Step 5 (optional): destroy all the RAID Group. You only have to do this if you want to re-configure the RAID Groups; in other words, chage the # of drives in a RAID Group, etc.
Step 6: re-create the RAID Groups and LUNs
Hope this helps.