MiTrend has been available for EMC Employees and Partners for years, but it’s a valuable tool that Customers can take advantage of also. And the price is awesome. It’s FREE !

Use it for VNX, Clariion, VMAX, and many more.

References: http://www.pragmaticio.com/2014/11/mitrend-self-service-performance-analysis-for-emc-vnx/

Each Storage Controller includes two 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) ports.

References: Introduction to the EMC XtremIO STORAGE ARRAY (April 2015), page 8

The system operation is controlled via a stand-alone dedicated Linux-based server, called the XtremIO Management Server (XMS). A single XMS can manage multiple clusters. Multiple cluster management is supported from version 4.0 and up. System version 4.0 supports up to eight clusters managed by an XMS in a given site.

References: Introduction to the EMC XtremIO STORAGE ARRAY (April 2015), page 48

TPSTUN is a VAAI primitive that enables the array to notify vSphere when a LUN is running out of space due to thin provisioning over-commit. The command causes suspending all virtual machines on that LUN. XtremIO supports this VAAI primitive.

In an environment where a host with two HBAs (VMware Best Practice) is connected to two fabrics and storage array with two Storage Controllers (EMC VNX, for example) the host will have four paths to a LUN: 2 Controllers x 2 HBAs = 4 paths

If you go to the extreme and configure your XtremIO with eight X-Brick, you have 16 controllers. Again, two HBAs per host and the max number of LUNs you can attach to an ESXi host will be 32… I understand, different OS’es may have different limits than VMware and this logic will not be applicable.

If you have hit the limit of 1024 paths per host (1024 / 4 controllers / 2 HBAs = 128 LUNs) and need to provision more LUNs, the best way will be to re-zone the host to limit the number of X-Bricks / Controllers the host HBA can connect to.

The following diagram displays the logical connection topology for 4 paths.

Architecting a database on an All Flash Array (AFA) like EMC’s XtremIO is best done by reviewing practices to optimize I/O performance. One consideration is the use of Advanced Format and how it impacts the performance of the database Redo logs. Advanced Format refers to a new physical sector size of 4096 bytes (4KB) replacing original 512 byte standard.

References: https://community.emc.com/community/connect/everything_oracle/blog/2014/07/18/xtremio-best-practices-advanced-format-512e-and-native-modes

The EMC RecoverPoint family provides cost-effective, local continuous data protection (CDP), continuous remote replication (CRR), and continuous local and remote replication (CLR) that allows for any-point-in-time data recovery and a new "snap and replicate" mechanism for local and remote replication (XRP).

Splitter-based replication, using VPLEX

RecoverPoint splitter-based replication provides synchronous replication, continuous replication with fine recovery granularity (journal based), and replication for active-active datacenters.

References: Introduction to the EMC XtremIO STORAGE ARRAY (April 2015), page 52

The XtremIO's RESTful API allows HTTPS-based interface for automation, orchestration, query and provisioning of the system. With the API, third party applications can be used to control and fully administer the array.

Normally you would access the API using some form of programming/scripting language, such as Python or Perl. However for the purposes of learning or testing concepts there are a number of tools that work better, such as HTTPRrequester and curl.

* Curl is a command-line tool that exists in all Linux distributions, and is available for most other Unix OSes as well as Windows.

To use curl to access XtremIO you’ll need to pass it a few options, such as the username/password to access the array (any valid account on the XtremIO XMS will work), the URL of the API, and potentially a few options such as -k to tell curl not to validate the SSL certificate (presuming you don’t have a valid certificate installed), and -s (silent) to stop curl displaying it’s progress as it downloads the response.

* HTTPRequester is a browser extension that is available for both Chrome and Firefox.

As with for curl, you’ll need to provide a username/password, which is done by clicking on the “Authentication…” box, which adds two boxes below the URL for the username and the password.

References: https://blog.docbert.org/using-the-xtremio-rest-api-part-1/