Once of my favorite features on Cisco MDS switches is Device Aliasing.  It is, simply put, aliases for World Wide Names which can be referenced in your config rather than a cryptic WWN.  For a good overview on Device Aliasing head over to Scott Lowe’s blog post on the subject.  Recently I had an environment which wasn’t using device aliasing at all – something I wanted to rectify. Mapping over 300 World Wide Names to host names was a daunting task, so I decided to automate it! Big surprise, right? I create a Perl script which takes a WWN as input and gives output, based on zone names, which can be ran on an MDS switch to create an alias. The trick is figuring out the name of the server, so I turned to my zones.  My host names are included in my zoning naming standard, like this: [box]z_vmax2384_testserver01_5f1[/box] As you can see my zones follow a standardRead More →

By:
On:
In: Networking

If you are like pretty much everyone I know who lives in the Storage World you seldom know what port on your SAN Fabric a WWN is connected with.  With Cisco you end up using device manager or fabric manager to try and find it – it works but I’m a command line kind of guy… So I end up logging into each switch in my fabric and doing the ole “show flogi database” routine..   If you’ve got a switch or two it’s not that painful, but when you grow beyond that it’s just plain annoying. I’m tired of doing that.  I’m tired of logging in to countless switches until I come across the correct switch.  I finally got annoyed enough to do something about it.  I decided to write a simple Perl script to automate the whole process. Check out the results below:   [box] cincystorage@symcliserver pub $ ./flogi_search.pl 51 192.168.1.50,fc3/21,50:00:09:72:08:3b:81:51 192.168.1.50,fc4/25,20:11:00:11:0a:00:4a:51 192.168.1.50,fc4/26,20:12:00:11:0a:00:4a:51 192.168.1.50,fc4/19,10:00:00:00:c9:88:7b:51 [/box]  Read More →

By:
On:
In: Networking

Recently I was working with a buddy who was trying to find out what devices they has on a EMC VMAX which were created but not in a storage group.  He was using SMC to do a whole lot of clicking on each device and checking its storage group manually.  If you know me at all, you know I like to automate things – Automate All the Things!  Dynamox over at Storage Monkey told me i’d automate myself out of a job one day and he may just be right! I decided to help this guy out and write something quick for him. It basically makes list of every meta on the system and if it doesn’t have a storage group associate with it, prints it out.  Simple concept,  but I don’t know if an easier way to do it.   [box] cincystorage@symcliserver scripts $ ./luns_without_sg.pl 9908 07BB,Unowned,400 07D8,Unowned,1800 0847,Unowned,500 0851,Unowned,500 085B,Unowned,500 087D,Unowned,500 0971,Unowned,750 [/box]   Pretty simple and useful.Read More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

The other day I was upgrading my Isilon cluster to 7.0.1.8.  Since I wanted to minimize customer impact I elected to do a rolling restart – something I’ve done several other times without problems.  Isilon has a feature in SmartConnect Advanced which allows the cluster to dynamically move IP addresses between nodes of the cluster.  What that means to my upgrade is when a node reboots, the IP address moves to a different node and my clients don’t notice the impact.   The entire upgrade process usually takes about 10 minutes per node. About three nodes into the rolling reboot, the node I was running the upgrade from, lost network connectivity in an unrelated problem. This stopped my upgrade process, leaving me running two different versions of OneFS.  The fix was actually pretty simple,  I had to restart my upgrade process.  In order to do that I had to stop the upgrade service which was already running onRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

I’ve always been an EMC Celerra guy since I cut my teeth on it so many years ago,  and it’s support of de-duplication (single instancing) left a lot to be desired by me – mainly that it could not work across filesystems.  When I first started investigating Isilon I had high hopes for de-dupe across the entire array because it din’t have separate file systems.. New announcements today bring that idea to light finally. It is certainly not a surprise that OneFS will support de-dupe,  but the fact that it allows it across the entire IFS is a huge benefit.   Data written to the cluster will be written full size,  but in post processing objects and files will be de-duped using an 8k block size. EMC is suggesting you’ll see a 30% reduction in storage consumption, but your mileage will vary.  This is great news for the Isilon TCO – it’s already low overhead in rawRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

I was browsing the ECN Symmetrix Forum when I ran across this post where someone was asking for a summary of capacity allocated to each storage group – something you can easily get with ControlCenter or ProSphere but not with the SymCLI.  Don’t get me wrong, SymCLI cave give you the information just not in a nice easy command.  So I duh out a script to share.     You just run this script and specify the SID and watch it come back with a list of ever device allocated sorted by storage group. [code]LUN, SG, Pool, Size, Allocated, Written, Compressed Size, FAs 1424,TestSG1,SATA_R6,275.0,226,257.8,226.9,”FA-9E:1,FA-7E:1,FA-10E:1,FA-8E:1″ 0C77,TestSG1,SATA_R6,300.0,237,283.4,237.4,”FA-6E:1,FA-3E:1,FA-4E:1,FA-5E:1″ 0A4D,TestSG2,FC_R5,150.0,98,99.0,98.5,”FA-6E:1,FA-3E:1,FA-4E:1,FA-5E:1″ 0C60,TestSG2,FC_R5,100.0,6,50.8,6.1,”FA-6E:1,FA-3E:1,FA-4E:1,FA-5E:1″ 0A02,TestSG99,FC_R5,50.0,5,12.0,5.7,”FA-6E:1,FA-3E:1,FA-4E:1,FA-5E:1″ [/code] This can take a little while to run – but it’s easy for reporting allocations.Read More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

One of the most annoying managements tasks of a Network Attached Storage is managing permissions for Windows files.  This is even further complicated using systems which allow for work Windows and Unix shares – Such as an EMC Isilon. If you haven’t picked it up by now,  i’m a command line guy with a strong unix background – so I don’t like using the windows GUI to control SMB permissions.  What I needed was really simple,  just to clone permissions (both unix and windows) from one file to another.  You can use setfacp/getfacl, but it’s kludgy and  deprecated in favor of ls/chmod.  So I came up with a simple perl script which can be ran on Isilon to clone permissions easily and quickly. As you can see in the example below permissions get cloned from <source> to <target>. [box]isilon-1# ls -led source -rwxrwx–x + 1 root wheel 1580 Mar 20 13:14 source OWNER: user:root GROUP: group:wheel CONTROL:dacl_auto_inherited,sacl_auto_inherited 0: user:DOMAINCincyStorageallow inherited file_gen_read,file_gen_write,file_gen_execute,std_write_dac,delete_child,inherited_aceRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

We recently turned on FAST on one of our EMC VMAX arrays and I was curious as to how much data was moving.  I didn’t have an easy way to see what percentage of data changes from day to day,  let alone hour to hour.  Getting the current data is actually really easy using symtier -sid <sid> list -vp,  but I wanted something to view historical information.  So I whipped up a quick perl script which will parse the output of symtier and recode it in a CSV format for importing into Excel. You can download it here: It’s really simple,  just run the script and pass it a sid and the path/name of a file to record to.. and it does the rest.  Like so: [box]mark@shell# ./record.pl 1234 ./tier_usage.csv[/box] A few second later you’ll see the information in the file you specify.  Now for the historical part you’ll need to setup a crontab entry which runsRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

Someone on the Symmetrix Support Forums on the EMC Community Network was asking for a way to report on Tier Usage by Storage Group. That’s pretty simple and easy to see with the following command: [box]symfast -sid xxxx list -demand –association[/box] However that is raw output and even if output is XML it’s just not that easy to parse into Excel.  So I decide to write a quick perl script to parse the output and turn it into a CSV.   It’s fairly simple,  but you do need to edit the script to specify the name of all your tiers. That is done on line 15. [box]my @tiers = (‘R5_SSD’, ‘R5_FC’, ‘R6_SATA’); [/box] Each tier just needs to be added as an element to the array.  Then you just run the perl script passing the SID of the array in question and you’ll get a CSV showing the Storage Group, Demand, Usage, and Growth like this: [box]SG,Read More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

This afternoon I was checking out my thin pool statistics when I noticed one of the pools had a significantly higher allocation usage than I was expecting.  I started digging into my documentation (I track every device created in a postgres database for tracking and trending) to see if a whole lot of devices we created over the weekend – and none were.  I started looking for an easy way to find bound luns that are not in a storage group – nothing!  I started to write my own shell script and the next thing you know I ended up with an inventory Perl script which tracks every meta device including lun id, thin pool, storage group, total thin allocation in Gb, and the FA ports they are bound to.   It’s simple enough to get with SMC but that is a lot of clicking.  So here it is! [box] ./inventory.pl lun_id,size,thin_pool,gb_alloc,%_alloc,gb_written,%_written,sg,FAs 11AA,200, 450gb_R5,97,49,95,48,StorageGroup,”FA-7F:0,FA-10F:0,FA-9F:0,FA-8F:0″ 2C2D,75, 2tb_R6,0,0,0,0,,””[/box] TheRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage