The most significant feature of this product is the FAST and FAST VP. FAST VP allows the array to intelligently manage the access to the data, wherein the data that demands high IOPS is placed into the performance tier. Whereas the data with a low IOPS requirement is placed into the capacity tier and everything happens automatically based on preset thresholds.
There is also storage tiering, secured access through initiator groups, and storage groups.
This product has enabled dynamic allocation of disk resources, and at the same time, improved the data access speed and application performance by a large extent.
Manageability is a bit of a challenge, as the user interface to access the array is not very user-friendly. Many important service consoles, such as the SymmWin is hidden from customer access. Hence, it blocks critical actions, such as failed disk change, etc.
Three years.
No issues encountered with stability.
This product can scale massively given its strong underlying infrastructure.
Technical support is very affirmative and efficient.
Yes. Previously, we had an EMC VNX solution. It was good, but was not suitable for large scale enterprise solutions, hence the switch took place. Also, it was a unified storage which was not the requirement in our environment. Therefore, no upgrade to the same product line was done.
It was complex, as it was a different platform altogether.
This part is taken care by another team, so I can't comment on it.
Yes, HPE and IBM storage solutions were considered, but VMAX seemed to meet most of our requirements.
Planning is very important, as this is a product with great capability. If not used effectively, most of it would be wasted, which would affect the ROI.
Originally posted at vcdx133.com.
My VCDX design architecture was based upon the EMC Symmetrix VMAX 20K. I spent a lot of time with EMC SMEs learning everything I could about it. The first step was learning the major building blocks of the VMAX and how it all fits together. The examples I provide below are with the vSphere ESXi host being the consumer of VMAX storage services.
Be aware that buying a Symmetrix VMAX is like owning a McLaren F1 race car; consider yourself lucky to drive it at the track since everything else must be performed by McLaren. Every VMAX requires valid EMC support, even adding one disk or reconfiguring a Front-End port from iSCSI to FCoE requires an EMC Engineer to generate a “BIN” file to update the VMAX configuration; you cannot do any of this yourself. Furthermore, EMC support is second to none, EMC engineers will visit your site to replace a disk or component before you are even aware that there is a problem (via ESRS – see below).
The EMC Symmetrix VMAX has the following major components:
The diagram below illustrates an EMC Symmetrix VMAX 20K with two Engines connected to vSphere ESXi hosts via Fiber Channel.
The EMC Symmetrix VMAX system has many features that are designed to optimise and enhance storage performance whilst being very efficient with the utilised storage. These main features are:
The physical drives of the VMAX are collected into Disk Groups with the RAID configuration. The Disk Groups are then associated with a Thin Pool. The Thin Pool is the physical manifestation of the storage that is then virtualised through the process of “binding” with each Storage Group.
Each ESXi Host that requires SAN storage must have the following logical configuration. The linchpin of this configuration is the Mask View, which associates the Storage Group to the Initiator Group and the Port Group. The Initiator Group is merely the definition of the SAN address of the host that wants to connect to the VMAX. The Port Group is the collection VMAX Front End ports that connect to the outside world (FC, iSCSI, FCoE, FICON, SRDF). The Storage Group is the collection of thin provisioned virtual volumes (called TDEVs) that appear as LUNs to the host.
Until the TDEVs are associated with a Thin Pool, they have no substance and are merely configuration objects. Once associated with a Thin Pool, the storage is then online.
The Fully Automated Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) Policy is then applied to the Storage Group and configured to continually run. This optimises the Thin Pool storage by moving storage “hot spots” to faster storage tiers.
The following EMC products complement the Symmetrix VMAX:
The diagram below illustrates an ESXi host with PowerPath/VE configured with the “SymmOpt” LB Policy, “Served” Electronic Licence Management, “Rtools” Virtual Appliance and the “VSI” Plugin for vCenter.
The following sites provide details of the EMC Symmetrix VMAX with VMware vSphere and should be used for additional information:
![VMAX [EOL] Logo](https://images.peerspot.com/image/upload/c_scale,f_auto,q_auto,w_80/nb70b5ansummme9cc5q5ymwyalbv.png)
![VMAX [EOL] Logo](https://images.peerspot.com/image/upload/c_scale,f_auto,q_auto,w_30/nb70b5ansummme9cc5q5ymwyalbv.png){kind=small}
We have EMC VMAX Secure service credential solution of SymmToken. You can maintain vmax by yourself instead of EMC.