NEW Celerra VSA!

UPDATE (April 2nd, 2010): new version of the Celerra VSA (5.6.48.201) is here

Please follow the link for the latest doc packages, workstation and OVA (vSphere) versions.   I’m keeping this post up for the threads….

Thanks!

Comments

[Duncan]

2GB, wow... Good reason to pick up a brand new PC. Wanted a core i7 anyway :-)

[Carlo Costanzo]

Thanks for this post. Can't wait to try it out! veeeery GLAD this is not an April Fool's Joke. That would have made me sad.

[Dave Williams]

Time to do some de-dupe testing. Thanks!

[david]

de-dupe is very cool, I have it on my NS40. on a 7TB filesystem of just general file share data, it has a de-dupe percentage of 28% so a little over 2TB of space has been saved.

[Doug]

Anyone gotten 2008 Clustering working with iSCSI on the simulator? I posted to the powerlink forums but this might be more visible.

I go through the basic config, create and configure my iSCSI target and LUNs, enable APTPL using "server_param server_2 -facility iscsi -modify EnableAptpl -value 1", reboot from the console.

I can connect to the LUN from both machines, however when I run the Server 2008 cluster validation tool, it fails checking for persistent reservation and the DM panics.

I get the alert "Slot 2 has panicked." - "The operating system running on the slot has panicked. The Data Mover slot will be failed over, if possible, and rebooted. " It recommends checking logs in /nas/var/emcsupport and /nas/var/dump however there is nothing there.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Erik Bussink]

The .OVF Celerra Simulator seems to have disappeared from the PowerLink site. Had to import the Workstation version inside vCenter 4.

[aenagy]

After I login to PowerLink I get the message "Access Violation". Is the Celerra VSA available to the public, i.e. non-EMC customers?

[Chad Sakac]

@Erik & @ aenagy - where is the plink link in the post? The VSA OVF is directly downloadable from the links in the post....

[Chad Sakac]

In fact - I just tried all the links (OVF for ESX, and two workstation builds) from the Internet and they work fine. There are NO powerlink links in the post, so I'm scratching my head...?

[aenagy]

Chad Sakac:

Sorry. Too much browsing, not enough multi-tasking. Please ignore.

[Erik Bussink]

Chad, indeed I get the links running again. I'm downloading the OVF version now.
As for the Powerlink links, there are none here, it's just that because I could not retrieve the files from ftp.documentum.com on the 3rd June, that I tried searching in Powerlink.
Thanks for the great potsts...

[Term paper]

Nice blog, its great article informative post, thanks for sharing it. Thanks for the information!

[Gregory Grant]

This is great! Do you know if the VSA supports NDMP backups?

[Vincent Aikema]

I echo Gregory Grant's question, but more specifically:

Is it possible to use the VSA to restore data from old Celerra NDMP backups?

[Chad Sakac]

@greg, vincent - not sure - the trick is that most NDMP is done via FC connectivity. While perhaps possible via NPIV, this is definitely something people haven't tried that I know of....

[Mark Soho]

I'm having trouble getting the iscsi service to listen on port 3260.

server_iscsi server_2 -service -status

produces the following output:

Status: Running
Iscsi is configured to listen on ports:
(none)

nmap confirms this and esx can't see the targets/luns that i have configured even after lun masking, etc. Any ideas?

I have the vmnics setup as follows:

vmnic0 - eth0 - cge0 - regular subnet ip address
vmnic1 - eth1 - cge1 - iscsi subnet ip address
vmnic2 - eth2 - CS management ip address

all of these are on the same vSwitch with vmnic0,2 on the same port group and vmnic1 on the iscsi port group (diff vlan tag). I've posted on forums.emc.com also, just wanted to see if there were any ideas. Thanks!

[Michael Snyder]

Can you eloborate on the changes you've made on your VM from the official Sim from EMC available in PowerLink?

Have you been able to port this over to a physical machine? For example, we have a iOmega StoreCenter Pro originally with EMC LifeLine, but we recently installed OpenFiler on it. Would it be possible to get this Sim to work using something like G4L? We are very interested in VMware Site Recovery Manager, which does not support OpenFiler. We would love to test with this. We could purchase another StoreCenter for ~$2k. Much cheaper than a pair of NX40s or something similar, until we understand to entire process...

[Chad Sakac]

@Michael - why not simply use ESXi (free), run it on pretty well any host, configure as much storage as you want, and go to town? We use it exactly like that for the purpose you describe.

[Philip Leighton]

Just downloaded and installed the latest VSA on vSphere 4 but now have an issue where the eth2 interface is missing ?

The VM has 3 network adapters - anyone got any thoughts?

(Posted this on EMC forums as well so hopefully someone can help)

[TBone A]

I'm having the same problem that Philip L. is having. It's the newest VSA on ESXi 4. I do not have an Eth2. What gives? I'd appreciate if anyone could point me in the right direction.

[Chad Sakac]

@Tbone, @Phillip - guys, something seems up with eth2. Try configuring eth3. You can explicitly bind the celerra interfaces to the eth interface you want (watch the movie sequence).

Testing a little more, the movies/instructions may need to be updated.

[Bill Oyler]

Has anyone else using a pair of VSAs and SRM 4.0 been plagued with the SRM error "Array with key 'BB0050569F23260000-null' not found"??? It happened in our lab with the VSA and SRM 4.0, and it also happened today at a customer site with a pair of physical Celerras, replicating, and using SRM 4.0. The error is triggered whenever you attempt to run a DR test in SRM. (This never happened with the VSA and SRM 1.0.x.) I did some searching on the VMware Communities, and it looks like it's a known issue with the current version of the EMC SRA 4.0 for Celerra. I've personally been struggling with this error since November when the SRA was released, so I sure hope this issue gets fixed soon. Here is the URL to the VMware Communities page on the error:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1395080#1395080

Anyone else running into this???

[Itzik Reich]

Bill,
this issue is to do when the celerra has an "-" in it's name or DM's
it will be fixed in the next rev of the Celerra SRA

[Kaj Lehtinen]

The download links doesnt seem to work for the ESX, any update on the availability or where one can download the stuff for trials?

[Andrew Storrs]

Chad, the links to the new Celerra VSA are broken now (aka someone cleaned-up the FTP server). ;)

[Chad Sakac]

@Kaj, @ Andrew - thanks for the heads up - links fixed. FTP server got hardened, and got a little TOO hardened :-)

Have fun!

[Josh-coen]

Hi Chad,

Another good post, thank you.

I'm only a few pages into this and I have a couple of observations/questions. I'm using esxi 4.0/update 1. As with some other individuals, eth2 did not show up. By adding an additional virtual adapter to the VM eth2 showed up, and shows its being brought up during the POST. After I configured it, anytime I reboot it, it starts up with the interface down. Eth0 and Eth1 are brought up, but I have to manually bring up eth2 everytime. Any ideas?

When trying to regenerate the VSA serial to match the UUID, I get the following error during/after is says 'shutting down nas services...', "/bin/rm: cannot remove '/nas/quota/slot_2/.etc/dp/dic/BB0050569B486E0000': No such file or directory" After that the VSA hangs and I have to do a manual reboot. A side note: smartd fails during POST (never seen it pass).

My final question (this post, i'm sure i'll have plenty more as I go through this process!) is with the required physical infrastructure. I have two physical NICs, but not enough ports to plug more than one in on my switch, is it a MUST for two physical NICs to get this working? Thanks for everything you do and provide to the communiuty.

-Josh

[CC]

Caution on this if you download it using safari it automagically appends a .TAR on the end of the OVA. Rename the file and you will be all set. :) Just an FYI.

[Duzhi]

Great post!

[Jorge Revu]

Hi,

Great post!! Just a question: Is there a way or a plan to recompile the VSA kernel in order to use more than one vcpu? It would be nice.

[kylet]

Where can I download Celerra VSA (5.6.48.201)?

[Rajaraman]

Hi Guys,

I have a Celerra VSA simulator running on a Linux Box with VMWare workstation.

Just a thought, is anybody tested / aware of integrating with the backup software to evaluate the NDMP Backup functionality (though i dnt have tape devices attached to the linux server, i planned to do a NDMP Backup using a media server in Netbackup 6.5.4)

Tried all steps as similar to the real NAS storage, but it fails while verifying the NDMP handshaking between Backup server and simulator NAS.

Your inputs or suggestion much appreciated...!!!

Thanks
Raja

[kvapzarov@gmail.com]

Where is the download link