SPM adapter for EMC® Symmetrix® VMAX®: Matrix support for automation of EMC storage operations via the HP Storage Provisioning Manager

Technical white paper | SPM Adapter for EMC Symmetrix VMAX
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Figure 1 depicts a typical deployment setup:
Figure 1: A typical deployment setup
Limitations
 Creating a new volume with a given RAID requires pre-configuration of a storage pool setting instance by the EMC storage
administrator. Generally, this can be done by creating a volume of that RAID through EMC native tools (SMC or SYMCLI).
 Creating thin volume for a given RAID requires creation of thin pool for that RAID, if it does not already exist, through EMC
native tools (SMC or SYMCLI) by the EMC storage administrator.
 SPM defines thick and thin volumes based on the capacity requirements. If a new volume is to be created with committed
capacity set to 100%, then a thick volume is expected to be created by the adapter. If the committed capacity is set to 0%
(or to any value less than 100%), then a thin volume is expected to be created by the adapter. This behavior is expected
irrespective of the storage pool being sent in the request. Hence the adapter implementation overrides the way EMC
creates the thick and thin volumes:
 When SPM requests a thick volume on a thin pool, the adapter will create a thin volume on the given thin pool.
 When SPM requests a thin volume on a concrete pool, the adapter will create a thick volume on the concrete pool.
 Growing a thin volume is not supported in EMC Symmetrix VMAX
 The SPM adapter for EMC Symmetrix VMAX supports the host modes Linux, Windows®, Windows 2008, Windows 2012,
VMware, and HP-UX. It has not been tested with the OpenVMS host mode.
 For all supported host modes, the maximum number of LUNs that can be presented to on a host initiator per EMC port is
limited to 2000.
Note
Prior to the 7.3 release, HP-UX hosts were restricted to LUN numbers in the range 1 – 7. For those earlier releases, the
maximum number of volumes that can be presented to an HP-UX host initiator, per EMC port, is limited to 7.
The precise limitation was that the LUN number in hexadecimal must end with the digits 0 through 7. Simplistically, this can
map to LUN numbers 0 through 7, but a customer environment requiring more LUNs can use additional LUN numbers as
long as their hexadecimal representation ends with 0 through 7 (for example 16 through 23, 32 through 39, etc.). The
storage pool entries in Matrix would be manually defined with the appropriate LUN numbers, and SPM will return suitable
storage candidates using the SPM adapter for EMC Symmetrix VMAX. With the Matrix requirement for LUN numbers
between 1 and 255, this technique can allow up to 127 unique LUN numbers for HP-UX on EMC.