If you’ve read my last Smart Zoning post on Cisco Smart Zoning you should have a good understanding of the how and why of Smart Zoning.  Shortly after that post I being the process of converting two SAN Fabrics from traditional zoning to Smart Zoning.  Cisco has an easy way to convert your traditional zones to a Smart Zone.  The base requirement for doing this is what you have Smart Zoning enabled.  It’s a simply process. # conf t (config)# zone smart-zone enable vsan 100 Smart Zoning distribution initiated. Check zone status. (config)# zone convert smart-zone vsan 100 (config)# zoneset activate name ZoneSet_VSAN100 vsan 100 It’s a simply process, right? All this does it query the FCNS database and marks each Zone Member as either init, target, or both. That is all well and good, but you still have exactly the same number of zones. The whole point of Smart Zoning is to reduce the management complexity byRead More →

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This morning I found myself needing to know what server was attached to each and every port on a large Cisco SAN Fabric. This can be quite the effort if you don’t have excellent documentation.  You can query the fabric login (flogi) database, but that will map a fiber channel port to a wwn.  That’s a start, but unless you have a map of wwn to server, it’s largely ineffective at proving human consumable information.   mds9513# show flogi database ——————————————————————————– INTERFACE VSAN FCID PORT NAME NODE NAME ——————————————————————————– fc1/1 301 0x8a00b0 50:00:09:72:08:3a:81:a7 50:00:09:72:06:3a:80:02 fc1/2 301 0x8a00cb 50:00:14:31:90:6a:79:12 50:00:14:40:45:32:6a:75 fc1/3 301 0x8a00ca 50:00:14:31:90:6a:54:12 50:00:14:40:45:32:6a:54 fc1/6 301 0x8a00cd 50:00:14:31:80:6a:54:02 50:00:14:40:45:22:6a:54 fc1/12 501 0xa50001 50:00:09:72:08:3a:61:e4 50:00:09:72:06:3a:82:00 If you want to see which zones map to the wwpn, you can use the “show zone member <wwn>” command to see a list of all zones associated with the specified wwn: mds9513# show zone member pwwn 10:00:00:00:c7:ca:3b:b8 pwwn 10:00:00:00:c7:ca:3b:b8 vsan 95 zoneRead More →

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For as long as most of us in the Fiber Channel space can recall SAN Zoning has been the base method of controlling access amongst SAN attached devices. A lot of us do this the classic Single Initiator / Single Target zoning – where one Host talks to one Array port.  In a Cisco SAN Fabric we have an easier way.  But first we need to understand why we do single initiator zoning. When a zone is created and an initiator/target pair added permissions are converted to an Access Control Lists (ACL) of Access Control Entities (ACE). The switch doesn’t care if the WWNs added are initiators or targets, its simply going to allow every WWN to talk to every other WWN in the zone. In our example 2 ACLs are created – one to allow the initiator to receive data from the target and another to allow the target to receive data from the initiator.  ThisRead More →

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SMB Change Notification is a concept that allows clients to keep up with file and directory changes.  The idea is to prevent clients from seeing stale content or having to constantly refresh their view. The server looks for changes to files/directories and, when detected, it sends a notification to the client to inform them of the change. Isilon supports three settings related to change notification.  The first of which, and also the default, is “All”.  With this settings Isilon will send unnecessary change notifications to far to many clients. Why?  If we take a look at a scenario where we have 300 users connecting to an Isilon share called “Applications”.  This share has a folder structure with a depth of 6 folders.  Lets say a user goes into the deepest folder, “Folder 6”, and changes a file on the share.  The server will notice the change and attempt to notify the clients.  When “All” is set allRead More →

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My passion, like many of you, has always been technology. It all started when my dad bought me my commodore VIC-20 when I was just 5 or 6 years old. I remember the using the external storage at the time, a Datasette. It was the first, of many, technological advances I’d see with magnetic tape and data storage in general. I guess I’ve come full circle now working in the world of Enterprise Storage and Backup for the past 15 years. We’ve seen a huge amount of change and advancement. From DASD to FICON to FAST the landscape is an ever involving one. Passion. It’s what drives us to explore new things, rise to challenges, and advance and support our environments. That passion is what excites us to share knowledge and absorb knowledge shared by other. That passion is what makes part of being EMC Elect special. To be grouped together with so many engaging export whoRead More →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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