Happy VMAX Humpday!

Today I will be covering something a little less technical but equally important and thrilling as my previous mini-series on Open Replicator.  I will talk about Masking views.  If you are experienced in VNX, just starting out with VMAX or have never seen a VMAX before, it would be nice to know how a VMAX can present itself to your hosts right?

So the basic concept here is that you have the following components which are formed together into a masking view in order to see storage on your servers (I’ve got pictures too!):

Storage Groups – This is where it gets confusing if you are a VNX customer.  Storage groups on a VMAX mean something entirely different.  On a VMAX, these are only the luns that are going to be masked to the host.  I’ll go over parent/child storage groups probably next week, but just remember storage group on VMAX does not equal the same on a VNX. It is a good idea that when you name your storage groups, you name them with consistent naming conventions.  For example if you know all of your Storage groups will be named HOSTNAME_BBQ, then keep them all HOSTNAME_BBQ and don’t change them to something like HOSTNAME_BACON, otherwise it is hard to understand later what you are talking about.  For you conservative and normal people out there, I like to name mine HOSTNAME_SG.

Initiator Groups – I bet you can guess what these are if you have been around storage for awhile.  Basically, these are your initiators!  So if you’ve named your stuff like you did above, it is probably best to name these HOSTNAME_IG

Port Groups – These are front end ports on a VMAX.  Usually if you have a rather large VMAX, you will have multiple port groups for say, AIX hosts, Windows Hosts, VMware, etc. These will most likely be shared with other hosts, so there is no need to create individual port groups for each host.  You can name them IHAVEACOOLVMAX_E0_7_8_9_10, but I prefer something a bit shorter as shown here (VMAX[last4sid]_Port_Directors):

So now that you have everything all created it’s time to create a masking view!  Simply…it takes all three of those parts and combines it into one view.  Like we’ve done before, consistency is also nice here.  HOSTNAME_MV.

Note on here, that ‘related objects’ contain Initiator Group, Port Group and Storage Group.  Now there are some more advanced options such as manually setting host lun id’s, etc…But I’ll save them for next time!

Hope you enjoyed the VMAX train to Humpdayville!

-sangeek