Add RecoverPoint 4.1 with SRM RecoverPoint SRA 2.2 fails with error “SRA command ‘discoverArrays’ failed” UPDATED

During an installation and configuration of an SRM solution for a customer based on EMC RecoverPoint 4.1 I ran in to an interesting issue.

When I tried to add the RecoverPoint Clusters on both sites using the RecoverPoint SRA 2.2 I received the following error message:

Error

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ESX hosts not registering on EMC VNX (and fix)

While working on an upgrade to vSphere 5.0U1 on a Cisco UCS environment, where the ESX hosts boot from SAN, I noticed one of the hosts was not registered correctly on the EMC VNX, as it showed up as unmanaged. Because the ESX hosts boot from SAN, the host has to be registered before it can auto register, and when it was registered manually  the host was not able to update the registration. Continue reading

EMC WebEx on VAAI support in ESX5 for CX4 at the 28th of June

Today I received a tweet from Chad Sakac, SVP Global SE at EMC, that he will be discussing some of the questions and concerns I raised in my blog post Challenges when upgrading environment with EMC CX4 to vSphere 5 and mixed CX4/VNX environment in next weeks Chad’s Choice WebEx, and in a blog post on his Virtual Geek blog.

Subjects for this call will be: Continue reading

LUN connectivity issues with Storage vMotion on EMC VNX when using VAAI

The last few weeks I have been working on some serious issues in an environment where we used vSphere 5 with an EMC VNX storage array. All seemed to run fine, but whenever we started a Storage vMotion, we noticed all kinds of strange errors we where not expecting at all.

We saw messages regarding write-quiesced VMFS volumes, we lost paths. and in some cases, the Storage vMotions did not complete at all.

During these Storage vMotions we noticed datastore latency peaked at more then 5 seconds on the source and destination LUN’s.

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Unexplained LUN trespasses on EMC VNX explained …

Recently I saw some unexplained LUN trespasses on an EMC VNX that is used in a vSphere 5 environment where we use VAAI.

Since we use pools on the VNX, it is advised to keep a LUN on the owning SP, to prevent unnecessary traffic over the internal bus between SPA and SPB. EMC says:

Avoid trespassing pool LUNs. Trespassing the pool LUNs to another SP may adversely affect performance. After a pool LUN trespass, a pool LUNs private information remains under control of the original owning SP. This will cause the trespassed LUNs I/Os to continue to be handled by the original owning SP. When this happens both SPs being used in handling the I/Os. Involving both SPs in an I/O increases the time used to complete an I/O. Continue reading