VPLEX VPD ID WWN question

Which hosts OS these VVOLS are presented to ? Have you had a chance to use INQ binary ? INQ has lot of options, and will give detailed info about vplex serial number with respect to VPDID

I know we can identify them using INQ, however, it is not on every host, which is why the question comes back to the WWN and does it contain serial # information.

Chris Fielding

Cell: 540-735-4014

EMC²

I couldn't find a way to decipher this, alternative is to place inq utility in a common share(NFS or CIFS) and you can access INQ from each and every host. Less tedious and easy to implement in my opinion. I am assuming you guys need this during troubleshooting or renaming disks on host side. If I can know the exact purpose of this I can suggest a better solution.

I appreciate you looking into this. I know there are methods available ,such as inq…however, the customer has a script they used for identifying and naming the volume in VMWare for datastore using the device WWN ID. Though this worked in the past for VMAX and VNX arrays, they are now trying to use the script for VPLEX and it does not work, since the naa-6 format for vendor section is not publicly defined.

Chris Fielding

Cell: 540-735-4014

EMC²

Thanks for explaining the situation. I am assuming 2 scenarios here.

1) Storage Admins who have access to VPLEX's want to decipher VPLEX serial num from VPDID

    --Easiest way to do this is collect nightly dumps from all VPLEX's with list of all virtual vols. From this dump you can relate which Vvol belongs to which VPLEX serial num. This can be achieved with a kron job and unix shell script. I have dumps setup from my Vplex's and each one takes approximately 10 mins to collect.  This dump can be integrated into your existing scripts to make your scripts work for both VMAX and VPLEX.

2) Second scenario would be the VMware admin is trying to figure out which naa id belongs to which VPLEX

   -- For this I recommend integrating inq in a script on ESXi host or install VMware Vsphere Storage viewer which can be installed on Vcenter Server, this will give detailed info of how many storage arrays are connected and VPLEX serial number can be obtained from the properties tab of each datastore with this plugin.

That was my thought and I actually did that…this works somewhat, but did find some particularities.

As an example the following two WWN IDs are from the same VPLEX:

60001440000000 10b 00ad5 7d145e 89 a9

60001440000000 10a 00ad5 b03d2e e0 92

I guess as time goes on I would eventually have enough imperical data to determine the differences, however, since EMC sets the vender information I was hoping that someone would know the format so there was a clear understanding of how the octets are derived…haven’t found that person yet

Chris Fielding

Cell: 540-735-4014

EMC²