50mu – about storage

If you somehow need to get some work don on your power feeds to your data center and the VNXe needs to be shut down, you need to manually shut down the machine before starting the work on the power lines. But knowing CX and VNX, this proved to be a challenge for me since the e model doesn’t have Standby Power Supplies. These SPSs used in CXs and VNXs do the work for you: when you turn the power switch on the SPSs or simply cut the power feed to these SPSs, the SPSs send out a signal to the Storage Processors, which will then flush the write cache to the vault after which the SPs will shut down nice and orderly.

But how do you do this on a VNXe model?

The best way is to do this from your desk! you don’t even have to get up and walk to the VNXe at all! There are two ways you can shutdown the VNXe.

• Through the Unisphere GUI: Settings > Service System > Select Shutdown and click “Execute Service” action. This option was introducted in the operating system version 2.2.0. This will shut down the system completely and only the Power Supply’s ‘power LEDs’ will remain on.
• Through Unisphere CLI using following command:

uemcli -d <IP_address> -u service -p <Service_password> /service/system shutdown

The Unisphere CLI (UEMCLI) should be downloaded from the EMC Support website and should be installed on your pc (Windows/Linux/Solaris/Unix). After installing this CLI you can execute the mentioned command to shutdown the VNXe. There is a Unisphere CLI user guide available on the EMC Support website.

In the older versions of the VNXe operating system there was no CLI option to shutdown the unit. The svc_shutdown command from the console (Putty) was the only way on those older machines. However this will not completely power down the system, it will unload all software from memory. After issueing this command a power loss won’t damage the data (like LUN corruption, OS image corruption, cache dirty etc.).