Resize limits for SAN LUNs

If you run lun resize command on NetApp you might run into the following error:

lun resize: New size exceeds this LUN’s initial geometry

The reason behind it is that each SAN LUN has head/cylinder/sector geometry. It’s not an actual physical mapping to the underlying disks and has no meaning these days. It’s simply a SCSI protocol artifact. But it imposes limitation on maximum LUN resize. Geometry is chosen at initial LUN creation and cannot be changed. Roughly you can resize the LUN to the size, which is 10 times bigger than the size at the time of creation. For example, the 50GB LUN can be extended to the maximum of 502GB. See the table below for the maximum sizes:

Initial Size   Maximum Size
< 50g          502g
51-100g        1004g
101-150g       1506g
151-200g       2008g
201-251g       2510g
252-301g       3012g
302-351g       3514g
352-401g       4016g

To check the maximum size for particular LUN use the following commands:

> priv set diag
> lun gemetry lun_path
> priv set

If you run into this issue, unfortunately you will need to create a new LUN, copy all the data using robocopy for example and make a cutover. Because such features as volume level SnapMirror or ndmpcopy will recreate the LUN’s geometry together with the data.

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Re-enable SCSI adapters on NetAapp

If your tape library or any other device is connected to NetApp’s filer SCSI adapter and you encounter problems with the device, try to re-enable adapters:

storage disable adapter 0e
storage enable adapter 0e

If filer says that adapter is busy and cannot be disabled, then force it:

storage disable -f adapter 0e

In case it’s a tape library, don’t forget to also re-enable SCSI adapters where tape drives are connected.

Migrating physical Linux host to the VMware ESXi

Well, perhaps the easiest way to accomplish that is using VMware Converter from the start. I believe there is a Linux version. However, I took another route. I already had an Acronis backup image. So my solution was to use this image as a source, which I fed into Windows version of VMware Converter, which in its turn converted it to VMware format and created VMware virtual machine on ESXi server automatically.

Using this simple procedure you can get a working system. Not in my case. Original OS used a software RAID of two hard drives. So I had to boot from a live CD. Then I changed fstab and GRUB’s menu.lst and set /dev/sda1 (root volume) instead of /dev/md0 and /dev/sda2 (swap) in place of /dev/md1. Additionally, I had to reinject GRUB’s boot files:

grub-install –root-directory=/media/sda1/boot /dev/sda

Then, if it’s SUSE you will have to change “resume” switch in GRUB’s boot menu line to /dev/null. Then after you boot into the system, recreate swap partition and point to it in “resume” switch. If you won’t do that, you will end up with the following error during boot process:

Kernel panic – not syncing: I/O error reading memory image

One tricky issue I had in all this story was related to kernel. As I’ve already mentioned original operating system worked on top of software RAID. And its initrd image won’t detect ordinary virtual SCSI hard drive during boot. So I had to boot from the SUSE installation CD and install standard kernel on top of original system. It solved the issue. Additionally I had to choose Russian language as primary during kernel installation, otherwise I ended up with unreadable symbols inside the system. But it’s not necessary for majority of cases.

I hope my experience will be helpful for other sysadmins.

Sun StorageTek SL500

I made several pictures of tape library which serves as primary backup facility in our data centre. Here what you can achieve with this library in maximum configuration:

• 18 drives with more than 9TB/hour throughput.
• Up to 575 cartridges and 862TB of uncompressed storage.

Our configuration is rather small, 2 drives and 45TB of storage.

Click pictures to enlarge.

Here you can see how robo-arm performs library inventorization by reading barcodes with infrared scanner:

Both tape drives and robot are connected to NetApp filer with SCSI cables. All data is backed up from disk shelves directly to tape library via NDMP protocol. There is no need to feed data through backup server which eliminates any LAN congestion.

Here are connections to NetApp:

NetApp storage architecture

All of us are get used to SATA disk drives connected to our workstations and we call it storage. Some organizations has RAID arrays. RAID is one level of logical abstraction which combine several hard drives to form logical drive with greater size/reliability/speed. What would you say if I’d tell you that NetApp has following terms in its storage architecture paradigm: disk, RAID group, plex, aggregate, volume, qtree, LUN, directory, file. Lets try to understand how all this work together.

RAID in NetApp terminology is called RAID group. Unlike ordinary storage systems NetApp works mostly with RAID 4 and RAID-DP. Where RAID 4 has one separate disk for parity and RAID-DP has two. Don’t think that it leads to performance degradation. NetApp has very efficient implementation of these RAID levels.

Plex is collection of RAID groups and is used for RAID level mirroring. For instance if you have two disk shelves and SyncMirror license then you can create plex0 from first shelf drives and plex1 from second shelf.  This will protect you from one disk shelf failure.

Aggregate is simply a highest level of hardware abstraction in NetApp and is used to manage plexes, raid groups, etc.

Volume is a logical file system. It’s a well-known term in Windows/Linux/Unix realms and serves for the same goal. Volume may contain files, directories, qtrees and LUNs. It’s the highest level of abstraction from the logical point of view. Data in volume can be accessed by any of protocols NetApp supports: NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, FCP, WebDav, HTTP.

Qtree can contain files and directories or even LUNs and is used to put security and quota rules on contained objects with user/group granularity.

LUN is necessary to access data via block-level protocols like FCP and iSCSI. Files and directories are used with file-level protocols NFS/CIFS/WebDav/HTTP.