Control Center 6.0
by Jesse on Jan.14, 2008, under ControlCenter
Finally got my hands on EMC Control Center 6.0, and so far, so good. The installation goes *MUCH* more smoothly than it’s 5.x predecessors though it still needs some manual intervention.
For those looking to simply manage a Symmetrix, you might want to have a look at SMC, or the “Symmetrix Management Console” It’s a very “ControlCenter-Like” interface, but *ONLY* provides for the management of the frame. You can manage up to 6 frames per SMC host, but you can put multiple virtual SMC hosts into a VMware server and thereby multiply your ability to manage without similarly multiplying your hardware costs.
SMC requires a local copy of Solutions Enabler, as well as local GateKeeper devices to the host, but since it does all of it’s configuration changes via SYMCLI, it’s faster. (ControlCenter does too much background processing and it slows it down)
I’ve not seen ControlCenter actually making configuration changes yet, so we’ll have to see on that.
What I always liked about ControlCenter is the reporting aspect of it. It definitely makes getting a clear picture of your storage environment easy, especially if you have storage-scope installed and enabled.
I’m going to Wisconsin next week to do a Clariion/MirrorView implementation, which should be fun since I’ve not done MirrorView in years. 
January 17th, 2008 on 12:10 pm
I just got off an interview with a Regional EMC Manager and he said that SMC will be a requirement in the future for any type of work on the DMX.
January 18th, 2008 on 11:00 pm
That goes right along with what I’ve been hearing from the RTS’s, which is that they are being strongly encouraged to learn the symcli .
and do their work using that instead of building binfiles. I prefer symmwin for almost all config work, changes aren’t as time-consuming and its easier to get a better picture of the whole config.
February 19th, 2008 on 3:09 am
I’ve got to go with the symcli every time. It can be time consuming and trying to build all those symconfigure files, but I’ve never had a lot of luck creating LUNs or mapping to FAs in ECC. Our servers are way overloaded though due to Symm agent, etc.
I have no experience with Symmwin, is that the utility that they go in with from the service laptop and enter hex cmds?