Celerra Virtual Appliance HOWTO 201 - Adding More Physical Storage

Glad to see that people are having downloading and success with the Celerra VM on VMware Workstation based on this original post.  I wanted to provide a quick "HOWTO" to help customers add more physical storage, so they have more to play with!

Before you do this - make sure you have a working VSA - just follow the Celerra VSA HOWTO 101 here...

I've updated the OVF - tightened it up a bit.   You can get the new one here

Ok - have you got it?   Have you followed the 101?    Ok... then read on...

Quickly then here - in this HOWTO:

1. Adding physical storage to the VM
2. Configuring the additional storage to the Celerra VSA (and how to remove storage)

Next up to plate are the 301 (setting up Celerra Replicator and SRM), and the Avamar Virtual Edition.

Read on......

Step 1: Adding the Physical Storage.  This step adds the VMDK, configures the VM by partitioning, formatting, and mounting (which acts as the control station), and then the steps that emulate "plugging in" the extra enclosures.

This video shows how to do Step 1:

You can download a high-rez version of this video here.

 Step 2: Configuring the Additional Storage (and removing it).  This takes the storage added and configured as a "new enclosure" in step 1, and configures it to be used in the Celerra as additional storage in the Storage Pools.   It also shows the steps to remove the storage if you need to do that in the future.

This video shows how to do Step 2:

You can download a high-rez version of this video here.

Have fun - and comments and questions are welcome, as always!

Comments

[afokkema]

Thanks for this great post. I have only one comment, the download link for the ovf file is incorrect. It must be: ftp.documentum.com/vmwarechampion/Virtual_Machine_Library/Celerra/Celerra_56_VSA.zip

[Chad Sakac]

Thanks afokkema - link fixed!

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=747762545]

Thank you for these tutorials, the VSA is helping me answer a lot of questions I have about the EMC platform.

Just because I'm a stickler for tuning, etc in virtual environments, I have a couple of nit-pickey questions.

When I use the default template, my disks end up in two different pools. Is there a way to make them all show up in one pool?

Can they be re-provisioned from the management tool or do I need to delete/recreate them?

Second, my additional disks are attached to a paravirtual SCSI adapter that has a significantly different performance profile than the boot device. Is there are way to make sure the new storage is in a different pool from the original disks or to remove the original disks so they aren't used?

Third, by my understanding of storage platforms, the performance pool is going to have significantly more spindles in a physical world. In a virtual world with disks as files on the same spindles, more "spindles" would mean more contention for the same device and thus be worse performance. Does the VSA take this into consideration? Is there really an actual difference (in VSA land) between the economy and performance pools or are these just conceptual?

Best Regards

[ベネトリン]

Hey, Great post

[ベネトリン]

Hey, Great post