Tuesday, July 26, 2011

EMC VNXe

The EMC VNXe 3300 is targeted to be a low-end / SMB / branch office type array.

These two documents would definitely have been useful to read before we bought the array
Some things that are rather surprising (even in a low end system) in the current build (2.1.0.14097):
  • NL-SAS disks can only be configured in a (4+2) RAID6 configuration
  • By default, hot spares are not configured when you create a RAID6 storage pool.  In fact, when you manually create a Hot Spare Pool, the wizard tries to talk you out of it.
  • When the failed drive is replaced, the rebuilt data on the hot spare is copied back to the replaced disk.  I guess this isn't surprising for people more familiar with EMC.
  • While VMware is one of the target audiences, there is no support for VAAI.
  • You can't grow or otherwise resize a LUN.
  • You can't remap a LUN to a different 'Storage Server' (e.g. move the primary SP of a LUN to the other SP).
  • Maximum LUN size is 1.999TB
  • The only performance information you get via the GUI is for the SP and that is CPU load, network activity and disk activity.


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