After waiting anxiously for these new boxes to ship, I was finally able to place my hands and install a pair of VNXe 3100s for a great customer in the Carolinas (-- and thank you guys for being the great customer you are!).

The initial set up was a breeze. We wired it up according to the diagrams provided, connected it to the network, and ran the Connection Utility to set some of the basics and network information. From there, we hopped right in to Unisphere--

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This array runs a slightly different version/implementation of Unisphere-- but it's beautiful. It has this hard to describe "quality feel" to it-- where all the screens transition smoothly, the options are clearly presented and accessible, and the "wizard driven" common tasks are put front and center. I did not install any Unisphere client/server options locally-- and don't even know if that's an option with the VNXes as it is with the big brother VNXs (<a href="http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h8017-unisphere-element-manager.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h8017-unisphere-element-manager.pdf</a>)

EMC is on the mark with their "simple and efficient" product messaging/marketing. In some cases I found the VNXe 3100 to be TOO simple-- where some of the inner workings weren't easily visible, and for someone like me that was hard to accept. For example, when you want to aggregate the network connections, there is only a check box that literally says "Aggregate interface". Well heck, how does THAT work? These are the kinds of things that I, for whatever reason, always want to know the under-workings of. So after digging through some of the Help Files I found that it requires LACP-- (channel-group # mode active for you Cisco folks) to function.

In keeping with the simple message, I found that most of the error messages we saw were super-generic, and made troubleshooting a bit interesting. "Error Code: 0x4. Please refer to the support page" is the type of message we saw from time to time when trying to configure and test out some features.

A lot of the "Celerra/VNX" features or configuration option names have been changed in what I expect is an effort to keep things simple for the intended audience-- for example, what most know as a CIFS server is called a "Shared Folder Server" within this version of Unisphere. There were also no mentions of File Systems, but when you create a "Shared Folder", under the covers it's carving up a file system-- with a 16TB size limit. And once that's completed, you can add "Shares" on top of the file system like you normally would.

CIFS services worked like a charm, as to be expected-- and Replication was a snap to configure. We did find, however, that it's best to let the Source array handle the replication Destination file system, but selecting the SOURCE file system, or "Shared Folder", and going to the replication tab, and selecting "Create Remote Replication Session". From here a wizard gets spawned, and if it does not detect an adequate file system on the remote end to replicate to, it allows you to create one and launches a Unisphere session on the remote array. After all that was done, replication kicked off. You can change the RPO for replication with a simple slider that goes from 5 minutes to 24 hours, depending on your requirements. Pretty neat and very simple.

What was the coolest thing to me that we were able to test out was the NFS implementation/presentation to ESX(i) hosts. The entire process is wizard driven and, again, simple and straight forward. You set the information for your vCenter server, and it finds all of the hosts registered and running under that vCenter instance.  After you provision the storage, it goes out to all the hosts you select and mounts the export for you. And yes, this works with direct-to-host installs too, where vCenter is not running. I'm not sure that words really do it justice. Below is a video showing the VMware integration-- and while you don't see it in this video, if you have vCenter up while you're provisioning the storage on the VNXe, you see the tasks it kicks off on the VMware side.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFrnomC1hKY">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFrnomC1hKY</a> 

In the end, I was quite happy with the overall experience. Knowing EMC's target audience for the VNXe, this platform is on target and having some knowledge of the deeper bits behind the platform, it's hard not to be impressed with what EMC has done here. For a deeper look at the innovation in this platform, check out Chad Sakac's blog post <a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/01/vnxe-incredible-things-in-tiny-transformer-like-packages.html" target="_blank">here</a> -- and be prepared to read for a while :)

If I can get my hands on another one I'll be sure to record some videos-- but until then, I'll be working on a way to win one for the home lab.