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 Both Celerra’s but decided in order to conserve some file system space,  tear everything down and recreate the LUNS on the DR Celerra using virtual provisioning, this greatly reduces the amount of file system space needed to allow replication of iSCSi LUNS to occur.

Here is the error I got while running through the replication wizard

The error here is basically saying ” I can’t find any suitable iSCSI LUNS to replicate to” which is sometimes the case when you forget to do one of the following two things.

1. Ensure source and target iSCSI LUNS are identical in size

2. Ensure the target LUNS have been configured as “READ ONLY” LUNS.

I knew it was neither of these two things and after a couple minutes of thinking about it,  the only thing to have changed was the LUNS at DR were now virtually provisioned.

After a little bit of thought I decided that I would try to create the replication task from the control station and sure enough the command completed successfully and the LUN replicated without any issues. 

Hers the syntax I used

nas_replicate -create LUN7 -source -lun 7 -target iqn.1992-05.com.emc:ckm000850009000000-1 -destination -lun 7 -target iqn.1992-05.com.emc:ck2000800009760000-2 -interconnect SRMReplication -source_interface ip=192.168.0.10 -destination_interface ip=192.168.5.10

Also if you are replicating between two Celerra’s, make sure that both are running the same version of DART and your running at least 5.6.45 or later.

*****UPDATE*******

 

This issue is resolved in DART 5.6.45