DMX-4 Interview Questions :

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What is the difference between DMX-3 and DMX-4?

There a lot of differences between DMX3 and DMX4

- type of disk DMX 3 : 73 Gb 15K / 146 Gb 15K - DMX 4 : 450 Gb 15K / 600 Go 10K

- I/O capacity

- cache memory capacity

- power consumption (=> energy saving)

- new softwares avaibility => ex: Disk tiering management => virtual provisionning,
Dynamic cache partition

see docs of DYNCP, SYMMIGB, SYMPRC, CC-ARM, ...

we've looked at a replacement of 2 DMX3 by 1 DMX 4, comparison of 2 situations

give :

- space and weight saving : 6 cabinets => 2 cabinets, 3833Kg + 1631Kg => 1638
Kg

- energy saving : 25.87 KVA+10.83KVA / 85100 Btu/hr+35800 Btu/hr => 10.45

KVA / 34800 Btu/hr

- optimize disk : 760 disks total of 84 Tb => 152 disks total of 81 Tb

- increase i/o capacity : 32+16 ports 2Gb/s => 48 ports 4 Gb/s

- TCO saving : replacement from 2 DMX3 to 1 DMX 4, we may have a reduction 37%
of TCO.

You may obtain better results with VMAX : replacement of 2 DMX3 by 1 VMAX,
comparison of 2 situations give

- space and weight saving : 6 cabinets => 2 cabinets, 3833Kg + 1631Kg => 1570
Kg

- energy saving : 25.87 KVA+10.83KVA / 85100 Btu/hr+35800 Btu/hr => 8.09 KVA /
26700 Btu/hr

- optimize disk : 760 disks total of 84 Tb => 152 disks total of 78 Tb

- increase i/o capacity : 32+16 ports 2Gb/s => 32 ports 8 Gb/s

- possibility to use FAST (not applicable for DMX4)

- TCO saving : replacement from 2 DMX3 to 1 DMX 4, we may have a reduction 40%
of TCO

What is the difference between DMX-4 and DMX-950?

Symmetrix DMX-4 950 provides customized Flash drives that break the performance
barriers of traditional disk technology because
they are optimized to meet high-end storage requirements. DMX-4 also delivers
built-in RSA security technology to keep your critical
data safe, as well as high availability to ensure constant data access. Best of all, the
DMX-4 950 is easy to manage.

How many Cache directors, Front-end directors and Back-end directors we

can use in DMX-4?

In Symmetrix DMX-4 you can have a maximum of 8 Front end directors and 8
backend directors.
Each Front end director has a corresponding Front end adapter on its back side and
each Back end Director as a corresponding Back end Adapter on its back side.
Also you can have a maximum of 8 cache cards known as Global Memory directors.

What are the different types of Front-end directors and the purpose of each
one?

What is the FAN-IN and FAN-OUT ratio of DMX-4?

First, we should define the term fan-out ratio.

Fan-out ratio represents the number of hosts that are connected to a single port of a
storage array.
In determining how many hosts to connect to a particular storage port, there are
three things to consider: port queue depth, IOPS and throughput.

Port queue depth Since a port can only service one request at a time, additional
requests are placed in the port queue to be serviced when the current one is
complete.
Once the port queue depth is reached, any further requests are rejected until space
in the queue becomes available.
When a host is attached to a storage port, the maximum port queue depth for an
HBA can be calculated by the following formula:

Max. port queue depth of the HBA = HBA setting * number of LUNs on HBA

What is IOPS This is the maximum number of IO operations that a port can service
per second.
In order to guarantee that a port will not be saturated, you would need to add up
the maximum IOPS for all hosts connected to a storage port and ensure that this
does not exceed the allowed figure.

What is throughput Most storage ports today have a maximum bandwidth of

4Gbps.
The same rules for non-saturation of a port apply here as to queue depth and IOPS

Explain Rule 17 in DMX?

What are the Management Tools for DMX?

What are the major components of System Bay and Storage Bay?

Explain Enginuity Operation layers

The Clariion Environment is governed by Flare Code and the Symmetrix / DMX by
Enginuity Code. The Enginuity Code was developed internally at EMC and so far to
my knowledge not outsourced anywhere for development purposes.

EMC Engineering is the crown of EMC, inventing new technology and pushing the
envelope in terms of defining future products, technologies and markets.

Unlike the Clariion Flare Code that is customer upgradeable, the code on EMC
Symmetrix / DMX is upgraded through EMC only. This code sits on the Service
Processor but also gets loaded on all the Directors during installation and upgrades.
On these Directors is also loaded the BIN FILE (Configuration of the Symmetrix)
along with the Emulation code. The initial Enginuity code load and BIN FILE setup is
performed when the customer first purchases the machine and is customized based
on their SAN environment.

As new Enginuity code releases hit market, customers can get the upgrades from
EMC. It is very normal for customers to go through multiple code upgrades during
the 3 to 5 year life cycle of these machines.

The service processor houses the code, but the Symmetrix / DMX can be rebooted
or can be fully functional without the Service processor present. The Service
processor will allow an EMC trained and qualified engineer to perform diagnostics
and enable the call home feature for proactive fixes and failures.

For any host related configurations changes, the presence of this service processor
including EMCs Symmwin Software is absolutely necessary. Without the presence of
above it becomes impossible to obtain configuration locks on the machine through
ECC or Symcli, restricting customer BIN FILE Changes for reconfiguration.

Enginuity Code level break down are based on the Family of machines.

Typically 50XX versions are limited to Symm 3.0 Models (3100/5100, 3200/5200,
3500/5500).

The 37xx versions are limited to Symm 2.5 Models (4200,4400, 4800)

The code levels 5265, 5266, 5267 are limited to Symm 4.0 (3330/5300, 3400/5430,
3700/5700) and Symm 4.8 family (3630/5630, 3830/5830, 3930/5930) of machines.

For Symm 5.0 and 5.5 the Enginuity code versions are 5567 and 5568. The last code
version for the Symm 5.0 and 5.5 is 5568.68.28. There will be no code upgrades for
the Symmetrix after this version.

Going into the DMX1 & DMX2 (DMX800, DMX1000, DMX2000, DMX3000), code
levels 5669, 5670 and 5671 are the major family Enginuity Code levels. For the
DMX3 and DMX4 code levels 5771, 5772 and 5773 are the major releases.

The latest version 5671.75.75 is the last known version for the DMX1 and DMX2
family of machines.

The guidelines for Enginuity Code level breakdowns is as follows.

Example 5671.75.75 (Please see the color coded system below)

First Two digits

50=Symm 3.0

52=Symm 4.0, 4.8

55=Symm 5.0, 5.5

56 = DMX1/DMX2

57 = DMX3/DMX4

The next two digits are

67, 68 = Microcode Family, Major Symmetrix Releases for Symm 5.0/Symm 5.5

69, 70, 71 = Microcode Family, Major Symmetrix-DMX Releases for DMX1/DMX2

71, 72, 73 = Microcode Family, Major Symmetrix-DMX Releases for DMX3/DMX4

The next two digits are

Emulation Number designated as EE

==================================================
==================================

How do you calculate number of cylinders for 50GB LUN?

Symmetrix 8000/DMX/DMX-2 Series

Enginuity Code: 5567, 5568, 5669, 5670, 5671

Includes EMC Symmetrix 8130, 8230, 8430, 8530, 8730, 8830, DMX1000, DMX2000,
DMX3000 and various different configurations within those models.

GB = Cylinders * 15 * 64 * 512 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024

eg: 6140 Cylinder devices equates to 2.81 GB of usable data

6140 * 15 * 64 * 512 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 2.81 GB

Cylinders = GB / 15 / 64 / 512 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024

Where

15 = tracks per cylinder

64 = blocks per track

512 = bytes per block

1024 = conversions of bytes to kb to mb to gb.

Symmetrix DMX-3/DMX-4 Series

Enginuity Code: 5771, 5772, 5773

Includes EMC Symmetrix DMX-3, DMX-4 and various different configurations within
those models.

GB = Cylinders * 15 * 128 * 512 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024

Eg: 65520 Cylinder device equates to 59.97 GB of usable data

65540 * 15 * 128 * 512 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 59.97 GB

Cylinders = GB / 15 / 128 / 512 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024

15 = tracks per cylinder

128 = blocks per track

512 = bytes per block

1024 = conversions of bytes to kb to mb to gb

Symmetrix V-Max

Enginuity Code: 5874

Includes EMC Symmetrix V-Max and various different configurations within this
model.

GB = Cylinders * 15 * 128 * 512 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024

Eg: 262668 Cylinder device equates to 240.47 GB of usable data

262668 * 15 * 128 * 512 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 240.47 GB

Cylinders = GB / 15 / 128 / 512 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024

15 = tracks per cylinder

128 = blocks per track

512 = bytes per block

8 bytes = 520-512 used for T10-DIF

1024 = conversions of bytes to kb to mb to gb

Drive format on a V-Max is 520 bytes, out of which 8 bytes are used for T10-DIF ( A
post on DMX-4 and V-Max differences).

What is the maximum hyper size in DMX-4?

64 GB

How many hypers can create in a Single disk?

DMX3-255
DMX4-160

How many members can contain in one meta?

255 hypers

How many LUN IDs available per port?

255

What Dynamic LUN addressing?

LUN addresses can be assigned dynamically or manually for each device that is
masked to an HBA.
Volume Dynamic Addressing (VDA) lets you take advantage of all available
addresses for a particular HBA.
To assign LUN addresses, VDA must first be enabled.

Manual assignment of host LUN addresses must be made at the same time as
masking. Once a device is masked, you cannot change its host LUN address.

How do you add a new member to the existing Meta?

Adding members after the initial meta device contains valid data requires a decision
on whether or not to preserve the existing data.
If you need to preserve the data, you need to include the protect_data option and
the bcv_meta_head option,
specifying the name of a BCV meta device that matches the original meta device in
capacity, stripe count, and stripe size. For example:

add dev 034 to meta 030, protect_data=true, bcv_meta_head=090;

What is stripping and what is Concatenating?

A striped meta device is one that places data on meta members in user-defined
stripes or chunks instead of filling
an entire device first before addressing the next device.
The stripe size (or chunk size) is the amount of data addressed on one device before
moving on to the next device in the meta device.
The following command forms a striped meta device, specifying a stripe size of
1920 blocks

What are the DMX-4 supported disk types, no. of disks and maximum
capacity?

Briefly explain the DMX-4 supported Device types?

What are the RAID levels DMX-4 Supports?

What are Vault drives and Hot Spare?

What is Preview, Prepare and Commit while using Symconfigure command?

You can invoke the symconfigure command in stages:

the preview argument first, then prepare, and finally commit if the first two stages
succeed.
Using the preview and prepare arguments allow you to confirm that the
environment will support the requested changes.
The preview stage verifies the syntax.
The prepare option performs the preview checks and verifies the appropriateness of
the requested configuration changes against the current state of the Symmetrix
array.
The commit option performs the previous checking and activates the changes in the
Symmetrix array

How do you check the back-end Operations on Symmetrix Array?

How do you check the failed disks in the Symmetrix Array?

symdisk -sid 347 -failed list

What are the service states of a device

How do you reserve the devices?

What is Tiering and how do you create the Disk Groups

How do you check the free space by Disk group and Array as whole?

How do you check the particular disk is connected to which DA Port and it is
resides in particular DAE?

What is drive looping?

How do you check the particular device is connected to which Host?

symmaskdb -sid xxx -dev ABC list assignment

How do you check the total allocated storage of a Host?

symmaskdb -sid xxx -wwn xxxxxxxx list devs

Host is unable to see the storage, what may be the problem?

zoning,masking

What is VCMDB and How do you take the backup?

volume control management database

How do you list the Hosts which are connected to particular director port?

symmaskdb -sid xxx list database -dir 7x -p x

How do you check the number of storage bays connected to the system bay
and number of disks in each storage bay?

How do you check the devices which are mapped to FA but not masked to any
host?

symmaskdb -sid xxx list no_assignment

How do you check the login hosts in the Array?

What is pre check list to assign to storage to the host?

Explain step by step to provide storage to the Host?

What is Thin Provisioning?

How do you create thin pools and thin devices?

What are the steps for storage reclamation?

How many mirror positions RAID-1 and RAID-5 will occupy?

How do you increase the mirror positions?

How do you convert the One device type to another?

What is FA Port Flag and how do you set the FA port flags?

How do you setup the Symmetrix metrics?

How do you check the configured environmental variables?

Can windows, Linux, Solaris share the same FA in DMX?

What are the External locks and how to check?

Symmetrix external locks are used by SYMAPI (locks 0 to 15) and also
forapplications assigned by EMC (>15)
to lock access to the entire Symmetrix arrayduring critical operations.
(Base SRDF operations use lock 0 and the Optimizer useslock 13.)
Using the symcfg list -lockn
parameters, you can list all locks on one orall arrays or just those locks targeted to
specific operations.

A list can be returned for all, a specific number, only RDF, only RDF-A, only MSCS,
oronly GNS locks (ALL
,
#
,
RDF
,
RDFA
,
SRDF_MSCS
, and
GNS
values respectively).
Listing all locks
To return a list of all host-visible Symmetrix arrays (local and remote), along
withdetails about all Symmetrix exclusive locks (known to SYMAPI) that are
currentlylocked, enter:
symcfg list -lockn all
The following is an example output:
In the previous example, the returned list contains three local Symmetrix arrays thathave no known locks, as
specified by the N/A values. However, remote Symmetrix000187900039 has an exclusive lock number 15 for a
configuration change activity

How to monitor performance of EMC Symmetrix?

How do you check performance statistics of a particular director port?

How do you check the cache activity of selected front-end directory?

How do you check the back-end I/O requests of selected disk?

What are the available performance information types in SYMSTAT command?

What is symmetrix optimizer and how it works?

What is Symmetrix QoS and how it works?

What is the purpose of Symmetrix Change Tracker?

What is Dynamic Cache Partitioning?

What are the logs available at host-end and on symmetrix array?

How do you monitor the real time events on symmetrix array with example?

How do you track the history of events on symmetrix array with example?

How do you check the audit logs on symmetrix array?

How do you activate the auditing on symmetrix array?

What is Symmetrix ACL?

Explain step by step to setup the access controls on symmetrix array?

How do you take the backup of ACLs?

What is Symmetrix User Authorization?

Explain step by step to setup user authorization on symmetrix array?

How do you perform backup and restore user authorization information?

What is Read Hit and Write Miss?

What is the purpose of bin file in SAPAPI database?

What are the services of symcli?

Explain step by step procedure to setup new host?

What are the Symcli Base Management Commands?

How do you prepare the Storage Capacity planning reports by host wise?

What are the Symmetrix Business Continuity Tool

By using what symcli command we can check the HBA details and physical
details

What are the business continuity tools for symmetrix array?