how to reconfigure BCVs from Meta ???

Generally speaking, both (you and the CE) can do that .. But it depends on a lot of factors ...

Think to symdevs like slices of your disk .. If you want to build a bigger slice, you need two smaller slices whose sum is at least the size of the slice you want to create. And they also need to be adjacent, one close to the other. With BCVs it's easy to find the size of your existing devices since a "symdisk -sid xxx -v -hyper show 01D:04" will tell you the list of devices that belong to disk 01D:04 .. And "symdev -sid xxx show 0BAD" will tell you where the BCV device 0BAD is in the backend.

If you are a lucky man and your devices (the existing meta members) are layed out in a lucky way, you can delete the existing devices and create new ones, using symconfigure. But you have to find at first where your devices are spread in the backend.

I'll show you later the output of symdev and symdisk in my environment .. Right now we have a faulted DWDM link ..

Note that you can only "delete" volumes on a DMX or above. What happens is "NULL" volumes are created in place of the deleted volumes, and the backend space is freed up. This prevents the volume numbers changing.

Earlier generation Symmetrix (ie 5.5 and below) don't support NULL volumes. The CE can sometimes remove devices from the end of the bin. Its also possible for a CE to do other volume removes offline, but this can result in volume renumbering unless the bin is padded out with additional gatekeepers.

Marc

Marc maybe I misunderstood your words but AFAIK you don't have "null" volumes .. You simply have gaps in the sequence of splits. Since the introduction of DMX (as you noted) we are allowed to have gaps in the sequence of devices in both the symdev output (from the customer point of view) and inside each and every drive (in the backend). Before DMX, removing a volume required an offline of the whole box and the GK padding you already mentioned. But deleting two devices will give a single big gap if the devices are adjacent. Maybe the null devices you are talking about are simply placeholder to allow gaps in symdev output (the Volume Map in symwin).

In the following example, you can see that devices from 2123 to 21DA are bigger then surrounding devices. We had 5 smaller devices, deleted them and created 4 new (bigger) devices in the single gap that we got deleting old devices. Since the new devices were only slightly larger then the old ones, we wasn't able to use all the gap and this is the reason for the big gap you find between 21DA and 1433. Since we are using RAID5 in the following example, math isn't that easy since you have an overhead for each and every device (slice of disk).


clst06/root> symdisk -sid 104 -v -gaps -hyper show 1a:d9

Symmetrix ID : 000xxxxx0104
Director : DF-1A
Interface : D
Target ID : 9
Disk Group Number : 4

Vendor ID : IBM
Product ID : IX35L146EFDY10-0
Product Revision : IBM146F
Serial ID : ECW2URYC

Disk Blocks : 286339876
Block Size : 512
Actual Disk Blocks : 286749475
Total Disk Capacity (MB) : 139814
Free Disk Capacity (MB) : 4264
Actual Disk Capacity (MB) : 140014
Hot Spare : False

Failed Disk : False


Hypers (43):
{
# Vol Emulation Dev Type Mirror Status Cap(MB)
--- ---- ---------------- ---- ------------- ------ -------------- --------
1 480 FBA 0FBD RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
2 481 FBA 0FE5 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
3 482 FBA 100B RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
4 483 FBA 1031 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
5 484 FBA 1DD8 Data 1 Ready 8632
6 485 FBA 10C9 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
7 486 FBA 10EF RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
8 487 FBA 1115 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
9 488 FBA 113B RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
10 489 FBA 1161 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
11 490 FBA 1187 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
12 491 FBA 11AD RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
13 492 FBA 11D3 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
14 493 FBA 11F9 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
15 494 FBA 121F RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
16 495 FBA 1245 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
17 496 FBA 126B RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
18 497 FBA 1291 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
19 498 FBA 12B7 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
20 499 FBA 168E RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
21 500 FBA 16A3 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
22 501 FBA 16BE RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
23 502 FBA 16DF RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
24 503 FBA 2123 RAID-5 1 Ready 2914
25 504 FBA 2160 RAID-5 1 Ready 2914
26 505 FBA 21A0 RAID-5 1 Ready 2914
27 506 FBA 21DA RAID-5 1 Ready 2914
- - N/A - GAP - N/A 2762
28 507 FBA 1433 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
29 508 FBA 1459 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
30 509 FBA 147F RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
31 510 FBA 14A5 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
32 511 FBA 14CB RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
33 512 FBA 14F1 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
34 513 FBA 1945 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
35 514 FBA 196D RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
36 515 FBA 1993 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
37 516 FBA 1F40 Data 1 Ready 8632
38 517 FBA 1330 RAID-5 1 Ready 2914
39 518 FBA 2258 RAID-5 1 Ready 2819
40 519 FBA 228F RAID-5 1 Ready 2819
41 520 FBA 1A9D RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
42 521 FBA 1AC3 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
43 522 FBA 1AE9 RAID-5 1 Ready 2883
- - N/A - GAP - N/A 1501
}

A "Null Device" is simply a volume which has been deleted, and the volume number (symdev number) hasn't been reused.

When you list volumes from Inlines they show up in yellow text as "Null Device", but it appears you can't see them from Solutions Enabler:

# symdev show FE -sid 1114

The operation cannot be completed because one or more devices are unconfigured

BR,
Marc

I think you need to update your Solutions Enabler, 6.4.x is the latest and the -gaps flag definately works there.

The point is that if you delete several contiguous small volumes, you should be able to create a larger volume in the space. You may need to delete 3 consecutive 4251MB BCVs to create a 9GB volume in their place. To be honest though, you may be better off talking to your EMC CE to check this out and maybe do it via binfiles.

I don't know anything about Recover Point - but yes, you can change the BCVs into RAID5 volumes. Off the top of my head I don't know if you can convert them directly, but you can certainly delete them and create RAID5 volumes in their place. Again, an EMC CE will be able to look at your config and advise.

Hope that helps!
Marc

Since the code uses cylinders when defining disks, I suggest you to use -cyl to show sizes in cyls and not in Mb.



You can't really "convert" your devs from BCV to RAID or viceversa. Syconfigure offers a "convert" command but it does not apply here. You have to delete old BCV devices and create new RAID devices. This may become a painful operation since when you delete 4 18000 cyls BCV device, you expect to create 3 RAID5 (3+1) devices, 18000 cyls each. But this wont work since RAID5 uses some more cyls for every slice so you'll be able to create only 2 RAID5 devices, wasting 33% of the space .. Nice shot

I cant' say anything about RP and BCVs since I don't really remember how is your infrastructure layed out. Please open a new thread and explain in a deeper detail both the infrastructure and your idea on the introduction of RP.

one last thing here....in order to do these configuration changes like
delete the devices and create a new ones..we need a downtime for symmetrix?

thank you ..

If you have a DMX you don't need a downtime. Almost all available changes in symconfigure are online. Since the hosts need gatekeepers to send commands to the storage, if the storage is offline (and GK are not available) how can symconfigure manage the box if all doors are closed ??

There are some exceptions to the general rule but usually have something to do with FA port configurations, not with device config.

Cheers !!

This may be an simple question: We have a symm 8830. If we want to convert some STD devices to BCV devices, we we need to convert the entire physical drive, or can we do some of the hypers, and not all?

Thanks.

Thanks for the response. It was just brought to my attention by a co-worker, that it depends on how the BCV's are not protected. The BCV's we are using are not protected at all.

You simply convert a symdev, not a whole physical spindel !
So if you need to make 1 copy of 3 symdevs, you need to convert 3 more symdevs to BCVs in order to associate 1 BCV to each STD you need a copy of.

Unprotected is fine. Protected as well. If you protect them, you need more raw storage, which is good for sales

I LOVE protected bcvs !!