First post! As I am fooling around with the templates and colors and such and getting used to blogging I figured I would kick things off with something simple and one of my favorite unheralded new features of Solutions Enabler (SYMCLI) 7.6 that was released at EMC World 2013: “quick meta creation”.
****UPDATE: Apparently this was enabled long before SE 7.6, SE 7.3 at least actually, so you probably already have this feature, thanks to Jason Moreland for pointing this out****
As anyone familiar with the VMAX is most likely aware Symmetrix logical devices have a size limit of 240 GB. And in most virtual environments the size of clustered file systems that are desired, such as VMFS, usually need to be much bigger than that. So the solution on the VMAX array is to create what we call a metavolume (which I will refer to as a meta henceforth because I am a lazy typist). This is a simple logical association of multiple VMAX devices and are manipulated to look like one larger device which allows the size of a device as seen by the host to be VERY large (255 total members possible x 240 GB size each–you do the math). These devices can be “connected” together either via concatenation or via striping.
Well of course this is old news, why is this the least bit interesting?