Frying Pan / Fire
by Jesse on Jan.25, 2008, under Celerra, Consulting, General, Replication
Well – after moving along for a few weeks at a nice leisurely pace, I find myself working on six different projects. Loads of fun, especially when three of them are just similar enough to get the details confused.
Got an iSCSI install next weekend though, this should be interesting. I think I have a handle on how the Celerra does iSCSI, so the only real trick will be setting up the hosts correctly. It’s a mixture of RHEL3, RHEL4, and CentOS5, which makes it even more interesting.
Another thing I got to play with last week was the McData Eclipse series FCIP router. When tied to a pair of Brocade switches (one on each side of the FCIP tunnel) I found them to be almost impossible to use. I’ve got quite a bit of FCIP experience in different replication scenarios, and it still took me almost 6 hours to get these connected. Talk about having to pay attention to detail, this was painful. I’d be infinitely happier with a Cisco 9216i with a 14/2 blade in it and be done with it. Eliminates the need for 90% of the make-work that had to be done to get this thing running.
In McData’s defense though, I came in unprepared, it was my understanding going into the engagement that the McData was already set up and I came in and found not only wasn’t it set up for FCIP, (it was set up for iSCSI) the tunnel hadn’t been built. So all we really had was a CE who came in, set the IP’s and ran like heck for the door.
I also had a Celerra NSX install that same weekend. The NSX is an interesting piece, very much like the old CNS boxes, albeit much smaller/faster. Modular setup makes it very expandable.
What I don’t get, is why, in this day and age, you are still required to use a floppy to boot the control-station installation CD. Bootable CD’s have been around for quite some time, and in fact the NS502g I ran when I was at the evil empire even booted perfectly off the CD.
The NSX required however a serial console connection into the server, and had the bios locked so you couldn’t change the boot order. Add that to the fact that EMC put the wrong crossover serial cable in the box with it (Mail-Female) meant a 2 hour install ended up taking 8 hours when you factored in driving around looking for a USB floppy drive (to create the boot disk) and a null-modem adapter (First time I’ve set foot in a radio shack in 10 years).
This week I’m off to sunny (?) Florida to do an ECC install and then off to Texas to do the NS20/iSCSI install. *THAT* should be worth writing about. 
Thanks.
January 25th, 2008 on 9:29 pm
Installing 5.2 or 6?
I’m only curious because EMC wants to set up my ecc6, when I think I’m more than capable(they basically dropped the symm and left, I didn’t learn for 6 months that most people simply have emc make their bin changes according to their needs, I had been doing it all along). My first year as a storage admin/flunky has been interesting, but I’d like 6 pretty soon, as I think it will make my life easier(VM support)
January 28th, 2008 on 3:11 pm
The 6.0 install isn’t that bad really, a lot of the same ‘gotcha’ that 5.2 had, but the install is much cleaner than 5.2, (which was light-years ahead of the 5.0 install) so it seems there is some real forward progress going on.
One other hest additions was the simplification of the installer. You can now take the 4 CD’s and copy them to a DVD (or thumb-drive) easily without any modification of tee installer.
To do this, create the following structure:
x:/Infrastructure
x:/Extras
Then copy CD #1 through CD #3 to the “Infrastructure” folder, and CD #4 to the “extras” folder. The extras ane everything that isn’t the infrastructure, Master Agent installer, etc.
Then you simply war the install from the “Infrastructure” folder and answer the usual questions.
The chin.The other bing change is that the network setup seems to be aware of network connections, because installing on my Optiplex with only one network card, it skipped the network settings dialog.
As usual, make sure you have all out your DNS get up correctly, it’s never a good idea to rename the infrastructure hest after ECC is installed. I had an errant DNS entry from a previous Be of the IP address that caused the whole install to go south. (Annoying, but not bad, a quick reinstall fixed it.)
That was supposed to be Sarcasm.
February 14th, 2008 on 7:58 pm
I feel your pain as it pertains to the boot floppy situation. If it makes a difference, EMC is moving to a bootable CD-ROM in the very near future.
February 15th, 2008 on 2:36 pm
They already have it on some – When I was working for Loan To lEarn I build the NS502G there from a bootable CD-Rom. I think it all comes down to a lack of consistency. Do it one way or the other.
If if you’re going to expect people to carry floppy disks, you’d best be ready to reimburse for the occasional USB Floppy drive. (I didn’t submit the last one I bought, because I bought it, used it, returned it)
Well I already had one at home, didn’t need another. Now it’s a part of the massive backpack-o-junk that I carry with me wherever I go.