How to create new thin devices using symcli and add them to a masking view and a storage group
Below are the steps that I used recently to create and present a few thin devices. More precisely:
- Boot disk – 50GB
- Two TDEVs 150GB each. One for data and the other for logs.
- Create a nested initiator group:
- Show initiator group’s details:
- Create storage group:
- Create thin devices and bind them to a pool:
- Add new devices to our storage group:
- Create a new masking view and assign LUN IDs to the devices:
- Add third device to the storage group:
- Associate the storage group with a FAST VP policy:
- View the details of newly created masking view:
symaccess -sid VMAX-SID create -name IG_SERVERNAME_HBA0 -type initiator -consistent_lun symaccess -sid VMAX-SID -name IG_SERVERNAME_HBA0 -type initiator -wwn 50060b0000c30e38 add symaccess -sid VMAX-SID create -name IG_SERVERNAME_HBA1 -type initiator -consistent_lun symaccess -sid VMAX-SID -name IG_SERVERNAME_HBA1 -type initiator -wwn 50060b0000c30e3a add symaccess -sid VMAX-SID create -name IG_SERVERNAME -type initiator -consistent_lun symaccess -sid VMAX-SID -name IG_SERVERNAME -type initiator -ig IG_SERVERNAME_HBA0 add symaccess -sid VMAX-SID -name IG_SERVERNAME -type initiator -ig IG_SERVERNAME_HBA1 add
symaccess -sid VMAX-SID show IG_SERVERNAME -type initiator -detail
symaccess -sid VMAX-SID create -name SG_SERVERNAME -type storage
symconfigure -sid VMAX-SID -cmd "create dev count=1, size=50GB, emulation=fba, config=TDEV, binding to pool=Pool1;" prepare symconfigure -sid VMAX-SID -cmd "create dev count=1, size=50GB, emulation=fba, config=TDEV, binding to pool=Pool1;" commit symconfigure -sid VMAX-SID -cmd "create dev count=2, size=150GB, emulation=fba, config=TDEV, binding to pool=Pool1;" prepare symconfigure -sid VMAX-SID -cmd "create dev count=2, size=150GB, emulation=fba, config=TDEV, binding to pool=Pool1;" commit
Don’t forget to record the device IDs. In my case they were the following: 016B (50GB),016C (150GB) and 005F (150GB) respectively.
Adding disks to the storage group and further masking require additional explanation. As all we know, boot device must be lun 0. But you can’t assign a specific LUN ID to every new device in one go during the masking step since there is only a single option, i.e. -lun, which tells the starting LUN ID. BUT, and that’s important, this option, -lun, would assign the starting LUN ID to a device with the smallest ID. And in my case that would be TDEV 005F and that wasn’t what my task was all about. To overcome that hurdle, I firstly added devices 016B (boot disk) and 016C (data disk) and masked them to a storage group with -lun 0 options. By doing that, I could guarantee that my boot device would be assigned LUN 0 (obviously 016B (hex) is smaller than 016C (hex)). After that all I had to do is to add the third data device to the storage group and it would be automatically assigned the next available LUN ID.
symaccess -sid VMAX-SID -name SG_SERVERNAME -type storage add devs 016B,016C
symaccess -sid VMAX-SID create view -name MV_SERVERNAME -sg SG_SERVERNAME -pg PG_NAME -ig IG_SERVERNAME -lun 0
symaccess -sid VMAX-SID -name SG_SERVERNAME -type storage add devs 005F
symfast -sid VMAX-SID -fp_name FAST_VP_NAME associate -sg SG_SERVERNAME
symaccess -sid VMAX-SID show view MV_SERVERNAME
Job done!