On September 9th EMC released a new SR for Enginuity 5876.251. For the most part this is a variety of fixes and minor enhancements but there is one new hardware feature of note. VMAX has introduced support for 16 Gb FC I/O Modules. So if you have some hosts that are using 16 GB HBAs and want to make full use of them you are gonna want this Enginuity upgrade. Of course you will still have to purchase new front end ports for the VMAX as the current FC ports will not be the correct hardware to support 16 GB.
Furthermore, the 16 GB FC I/O Modules will not have four ports, but instead two so keep that in mind when preparing cabling.
On a side note you might hear EMCers refer to I/O Modules as SLICs. Recently found out from my good friend/colleague Kevin Loehfelm in Symmetrix DVT, what that actually stands for: Small I/O Card. Fun (?) Fact. Also note that these SLICs are not supported for things like SRDF, FTS or FLM. Check out the release notes for more information. One more note on that is that they will only be supported on the 10K and the 40K. No 20K.
Enginuity 5876.251 Release Notes:
One last thing to mention on this is there is a mention of a VAAI issue that is resolved in this release. This is NOT a new issue, it was encountered in 5876.159 and .163 and was fixed with an ePack in both. 5876.229 and later have this fix by default.
So on to Solutions Enabler….
https://support.emc.com/downloads/2071_Solutions-Enabler
Not much here really but I want to mention one thing I did notice in the release notes for SE 7.6.1, is the section on support deprecation. There is a long list of features, commands, options and platforms that will no longer be supported after 7.6.x. CLARiiON/VNX systems entirely, 32-bit Windows etc. Check it out–will be helpful for planning. The 7.6 release notes has a similar but less complete list but I didn’t notice it before–shame on me for not reading more closely the first time around!
Not really any new features that I noticed though–just fixes/enhancements. The new features list in the RNs are the same as the ones in SE 7.6 RNs.
https://support.emc.com/docu49288_Solutions-Enabler-7.6.1-Release-Notes.pdf?language=en_US
Thanks for the update Cody!!!
You’re welcome!
I don’t understand why they want to remove support for Clariion/VNX. I have many boxes that have storage from both arrays and system admins really like using syminq ..etc (yes i know of inq, it’s not as good)
Yeah I’m not 100% sure myself, if I had to guess is that they are working on something that will support all of the EMC products and the SE team decided to keep their focus on just Symmetrix and let whatever else be cross-platform.
Sounds interesting. If I’m not mistaken our current SMI-S provider is part of SE. Does this mean we’ll have VNX/Clariion eliminated from SMI-S provider as well?!
Not sure about that. My guess is no–it will probably still support VNX/CX. While it comes with SE i think it is more of a bundling than really being a part of it. So they might still be able to support other arrays. Or maybe it will be entirely separate in a future release. I haven’t seen anything at this point to indicate the direction. Just guessing at this point.
Thanks Cody,
It’s really interesting what’s going to happen with SMI-S and CLARiiON/VNX. I didn’t like that dependency anyway.
Talking about SE, when is the support for CG and DG containing SG comming ? I saw this in SE7.6 pre-sales slides for Q2, but it looks like it din’t make it .
Well I don’t know about SMI-S and VNX dropping support but SE seems to be according to their docs.
As far as those containing SGs not sure. Usually if something doesnt make it into a release it just comes in the next, but I will check to make sure it wasn’t just not well documented or something.