FLARE 30 is out in the wild!

If you didn’t already know, after a few delays, FLARE 30 is now available for download on PowerLink. I’ve been playing with Unisphere a bit, and it seems like an improvement over ole Navisphere. However, it’ll take awhile to shed those old Navi ways. At the very least its a solid base to start fresh on.

If I have any disappointment…. it would be how much DIDN’T change in Unisphere. In particular I was disappointed to see very little was done to improve analyzer. Lets hope thats something they build upon in later versions. Perhaps I was just expecting too much for a v1.0 release. Don’t get me wrong, I STRONGLY SUPPORT EMC revamping the midrange administraton tools.

One small thing is Unisphere finally shows you what failover mode a host is at in connection manager. I realize it was no big deal to find out, but its one less proceedure to do. They also put the name of the mode along with the number (IE 4 = ALUA and so on).

Also the way snapshots and clones are presented/organized is a pretty big step forward. I could go on and on, just download Unisphere and play around.

I can’t tell you how it looks with the Celerra yet since none of my Celerra’s are on DART 6. If you try to administer a DART 5.x box, it launches a browser window to the control station (how nice of it!).

I’m currently trying to figure out if a Celerra running DART 5.6.49 will work with FLARE 30 or not. I have a NS-960 basically not doing anything (who doesn’t?!), but I don’t want to brick the DART installation if I can avoid it! If/when I can get a straight answer out of EMC I’ll update this post.

I really want to put FAST Cache and all VAAI through the paces before unleashing this day 1 code onto my poor customers & users. Hopefully I’ll get a thumbs up/down by this weekend from support and I can start doing some IO testing and report back.

Of note I was told by an EMC TC that FLARE 30 = RecoverPoint upgrade, but I’ve yet to find a document to back that up. Just incase I bounced this CX/NS-960 out of the available RP splitters for now.

Dynamically rescan LUN’s on SLES

I’m sure this is kids play to most people, but I’ve just not done much SAN work with Linux.

We bought a new EMC CLARiiON CX4-240, and I was just tossing it random LUN’s to do speed & HA tests. When I added a LUN I’d see it in powermt, and I didn’t know what the equivalent of devfsadm was in Linux … SLES to be specific. What can I say, I worked with Solaris way too long.

The first step is to run: powermt display

# powermt display
CLARiiON logical device count=3
================================================
—– Host Bus Adapters ——— —— I/O Paths —– —— Stats ——
### HW Path Summary Total Dead IO/Sec Q-IOs Errors
================================================
3 qla2xxx optimal 6 0 – 0 0
4 qla2xxx optimal 6 0 – 0 0

Note the 3/4 preceding the HBA’s.

Now, execute this:

# echo “- – -” > /sys/class/scsi_host/host3/scan
# echo “- – -” > /sys/class/scsi_host/host4/scan

Its my understand this also works on RHEL and others, but YMMV. This is all buried in the PowerPath manual too, but hopefully I’ve saved someone a bit of time.

Till next time…