Sunday 11 January 2009

EMC Celerra simulator

I wrote last week about the SUN Fishworks VSA, openly available to download play about with and use the same code that would run on there Unified storage. This first write up is about my other ongoing testing with the EMC Celerra Virtual Appliance.

This isn't as easy to download as the SUN one, you need a powerlink username, however Chad Sakac over at Virtual Geek has made it available to download at http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/06/get-yer-celerra.html, he also has an excellent series on how to deploy and test this into a Vmware development environment.

The EMC Celerra family offers either the standard Integrated SAN where the disk storage and NS array controllers are within the same physical unit OR EMC offer the NS(G) devices to implement as Gateway heads to basically use inband with backend Symmetrix or Clariion storage. Not quite sure which one is the most popular on the market, it would be interesting to know what people reading actually use.

The EMC Celerra simulator is an download for storage bods to download, provided is a full license with the option to go as far as performing replication, Chad has on Virtual Geek also wrapped it into a OVF format which means you can just download and import. I downloaded the appliance from Powerlink myself and just imported with Vmware converter.

Functionality wise I have only currently got some basic LUN's and have connected across to the NFS mount, so next steps will be to do some possible replication to another filer to see how good and simple it is to do.

Compared to the SUN Unified appliance i found the EMC to be slightly less easy to get up and running, however I would say that this shows how much it has to offer in terms of functionality and also flexibility, the Celerra does have very intuitive guis for the likes of me so it is still very easy to implement.

I'll be testing the two and possibly even looking at brushing off the Netapp filer VSA at some point so keep your eyes peeled if your interested in seeing how things go.


Comments:
Hello Daniel,
Honestly i have gone through ur posting, but i dont know if i can ask for for a favour from you.
I will appreciate if you can help me download all these stuffs in to a CD because my internet speed speed bad that it will take me days to download the software.
Please help me out.
 
May I suggest contacting a member of EMC for a DVD Copy?

Thanks
 
What's the difference between cli and xml-api, in terms of vp luns?
xml-api fails creating them, cli doesn't :)
feel free to reproduce
* XML - API
* Exception tag: 1244dd2e4b3
* Exception message: unexpected attribute "virtualProvisioning"
*
* SSH - CLI
* [nasadmin@celerra ~]$ server_iscsi id=1 -lun -number 120 -create CELERRA_TARGET -size 100 -fs id=117 -vp yes
* celerra_1 : done
*
* Warning 17716815834: celerra_1 : You have just created a virtually provisioned (sparse) LUN.
* To avoid data unavailability and potential data loss when a filesystem is 100 percent full,
* monitor file system utilization to ensure the file system contains sufficient free space for LUN growth.
* For more information, refer to Configuring iSCSI Targets on Celerra available on the user documentation CD.
 

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