Have you tried rebooting?

Your Clariion storage processor management server?

Here’s the scenario, you have a host in your Clariion config you no longer want. Maybe it’s retired or you virtualized it or maybe you just plain fat fingered the name when you manually registered the darn thing. Regardless, it’s there and you want it gone.

Of course you have already done the following:

1. Removed the Host from its storage group.

2. De-registered all associated HBAs

But that darn host won’t go away in the Host list. The problem is that each Storage Processor needs to rescan the Fabric. To do this you have to Reboot (OK really its restart) each SP’s management servers. Below are the steps to do so.

You must do the following on both SPA and SPB.

Log into SP setup interface

http://SP IP address/setup

Enter your login Credentials (nas admin should work)

Scroll down until you see the following and click "Restart Management Server".

Click the "yes" radio button and then "submit"

That’s it! You should be good to go. Logout and log back in to any Unisphere or Navisphere interface you may have been in and check you host list.

The concept of rebooting or restarting some service seems to be a theme that comes up over and over in an IT Admin’s career. I believe the concept of rebooting one’s own internal system is something that we as organic machines don’t do often enough. Too many times we get stuck in our ways closing our minds to new possibilities. Whether it’s with your job or personal life the next time you seem to get stuck on a process or feel you are in a never ending loop of negative feedback, ask yourself.

Have you tried rebooting?

Celerra VSA UBERv3 Uniphere

The EMC Celerra VSA UBERv3 for DART 6 is here! Now you can test Unisphere in all it’s NAS glory for free. This includes, CIF, NFS, iSCSI (for DART). Much thanks goes out to Nick Weaver for all the hard work, the NAS gods are very pleased. The sim runs mucho fast and is a huge improvement from the already awesome UBERv2 edition which runs DART 5.6

By the way the VMware Workstation edition runs just fine on a Mac with VMware Fusion. Just set your NICs to connect directly to the physical network (Bridged) and specifically set which physical NIC on the host machine to use, NOT AUTODETECT.

Did I mention that you can test replication and check points with this bad boy. Oh yeah!

I will follow up shortly with some Unisphere how to videos in high rez!

~NA

NGDP: Backing up with dedupe.

EMC's Next Generation Data Protection (NGDP) portfolio is stacked with products providing cutting edge technologies that provide several benefits for backing up, archiving and protecting your data.

Avamar (Data Deduplication / Remote office Backup)

Data Domain (Plug and Play back up to disk with Deduplication)

RecoverPoint (Continuous Data Protection)

Networker (Enterprise Backup and Recovery)

Centera (Content Addressed Storage, Data Archiving)

Source One (E-mail Archiving)

Today I am going to focus on the first two on the list: Avamar and Data Domain with a quick white board session. Both technologies utilize deduplication with different approaches.

The Data Domain appliances series is referred to as target based dedupe or inline dedupe and integrates with virtually any back up software out there as well it has very flexible connectivity options from NFS, CIFS and VTL.

Avamar utilizes local processing power of the client servers themselves with source based deduplication. Its great for shrinking your backup windows from several hours to minutes and an excellent choice for remote office backup.

Without further ado.... (Warning my white board is rather small).

Unisphere Videos

Below are three Unisphere videos in Hi Rez. Some of these are reposts from other blogs but I wanted a central place to shoot a link to people who are curious about the upcoming highly anticipated UI. Third quarter can't happen soon enough. Give us Unisphere!

This is the video from EMC World 2010 that gives a nice overview of Uni.

New Features for the unified mid-tier storage system. FAST, Fast Cache, & Compression.

Nice vSphere integration.

-NA

and 3

Passed NAS Implementation Engineer Exam yesterday (E20-361)! Think I'll take the summer off from certifications, three in the last four months has worn me out.

NA

Hello Unisphere!

At last, the time has come for the combined user interface to manage EMC's mid Tier storage solution for NAS and SAN. Previously having to manage both aspects of the storage array called for the administrator to use two management tools, Navisphere for the backend (SAN) and Celerra Manager for the front end (NAS). I can honestly say that when I was first new to EMC storage management, this threw me off and caused me a few headaches. I also installed my first NS20 by myself without help from EMC professional services (not recommended by my sales rep at the time, thanks Joanna). Not having a combined management platform is also one of EMC's competitors biggest sale pitch slaps in the face. Well, those days are over.

Stated to be released in the third quarter 2010, Unisphere will come preloaded on all of EMC's mid Tier arrays. Also, existing customers will be able to get it as well, as soon as they upgrade to DART 6.0 (NAS) and FLARE 30 (SAN) coded levels.

I was lucky enough to go to EMC World 2010 last week. I attended several break out sessions that allowed me to get my hands on Unisphere. I apologize in advance for the shabby screen shots as they are scans off of my lab manuals. I don't have access to Unipshere to test in my own environment....yet.


This thing is slick! No longer are we dealing with an interface that looks like it was built in the early 90s. I found it quite easy to use as well. After one quick Hands on Lab I was able to carve out storage pools and raid groups, set my hot spare, define LUNs, expand and shrink those LUNs and then jump right into to defining my file systems for CIFs and NFS.


It also comes with nice graphs and snap like widget functionality that can be set by preference (a la google home page).










For those of you who are worried about learning a new interface, don't sweat it. There are similarities to the previous tool sets. Check out the pics below.

Look familiar?










I know I've seen this somewhere before...hmmmm.















Now its time to answer a few questions I have been getting.

Will I still be able to use Celerra Manger and Navisphere once I get to the latest DART and FLARE code levels?
Negative, once you get to DART 6.0 and FLARE 30 you will only use Unisphere.

Can I use Unisphere to manage more than one array?
Absolutely, you can manage multiple Celerras and Clariions from the same Unisphere UI. The Celerras must be at DART 6.0 but the Clariions can be as far back as FLARE 19.

Will there be a Unipshere simulator similar to the Celerra VSA?
I can only speculate on what I have heard via rumors, which is most likely YES!
If I were you I would ask the virtual geek Chad to confirm though.

~NAS Admin