How to Create Virtually Provisioned iSCSI LUNS on EMC Celerra

When creating iSCSI LUNS on a Celerra I typically have all file systems created before hand and then use the command line to create iSCSI LUNS in each file system.
A couple of weeks ago I decided for some reason to use the wizard “Create new iSCSI LUN” and noticed something that was not present in the older [...]

Issue Replicating Fully Provisioned to Virtually Provisioned iSCSI Luns on EMC Celerra

I was doing some work on a couple of EMC Celerra’s this week and found an issue which I expect is a bug in the DART code, I managed to work around it using the command line, so I thought I would post incase anyone else comes across this same issue.
Initially I had fully provisioned LUNS on [...]

EMC Replication Manager With vSphere 4 and LVM.EnableResignature

Ive had Replication Manager 5.2 integrated with VMware VI3, hanging off an EMC Celerra using iSCSI for some time now, and ever since vSphere was released Ive been meaning to test the functionality to make sure everything works and to see if there are any changes.
Now having set this up with 3.5 update 4 hosts [...]

Celerra iSCSI Targets visible to all Initiators

Something I noticed last week while working on a customers site was multiple iSCSI initiators logged into iSCSI targets which I had not granted access.
I’ll fire up my lab to demonstrate what I saw and how to change the behavior.
Here on my Celerra simulator I have three iSCSI Targets configured for VMware, Exchange and SQL. [...]

How to enable sparseTWS Snapshots for Celerra

My last post hopefully shed a little light on file system requirements for iSCSI luns on the EMC Celerra when replication or snapshots will be used. If you missed this and you think it might be of interest you can read it here.
First lets verify what the current value for sparseTWS is set to
[nasadmin@EMCNAS ~]$ [...]

Celerra iSCSI Luns and File System Sizing

Ive deployed a number of Celerra’s into customer sites over the last year and although the feature packed Celerra can present storage using CIFS and NFS, the majority of systems have been deployed using iSCSI for VMware environments.
Now if your not planning to replicate or snapshot your iSCSI luns, then these considerations do not apply, [...]

Celerra NAS Support for RAID 10

I was reading a post on a blog the other day from someone in the storage world, I forget what the site was now but something he wrote stuck in my mind.
 ” Application performance is determined often by Storage performance “
No matter where you look these days organizations are Virtualizing and Consolidating systems, it doesn’t matter [...]

Celerra Lun fails to snapshot during SRM Test

Today I was thinking about a problem I had this week with site recovery manager and thought id post something just to keep track of the errors and in case someone had the same problem. Let me paint a picture.
Protected Site
Virtual Center Server with SRM installed
Celerra storage replication adapter
Three  node VMware HA/DRS cluster.
Celerra NS120 presenting 3 x iSCSI luns to [...]

Installation Error – 1155 instmsi30.exe not found

The other night I was up installing the new Celerra SRM failback plug-in and I come across this hideous error “Installation Error – 1155 instmsi30.exe not found” when I tried to install the plug-in.
The virtual machine I installed this on was built from scratch rather than a template which I use at our production site [...]

Disk Alignment

I wanted to post about something  I recently found made a significant difference in performance testing done on a Celerra NS20.
I found a  this post http://clariionblogs.blogspot.com/2008/02/disk-alignment.html at Clariion blog central which has an excellent explanation about how and why disk misalignment occurs, defiantly worth a read.
The NS20 I refer to above is our production Celerra we [...]