Feature Specification
Microcode Level: Enginuity 5773, 5874, 5875
Product/Feature: Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning
Involved Components: Enginuity, Solutions Enabler, EMC Ionix
ControlCenter, Symmetrix Management Console
Introduction
FAST VP introduced in Enginuity™ operating environment
version 5875 for Symmetrix® builds on and extends the
capabilities of Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning™ to provide
a new form of Fully Automated Storage Tiering for the
Symmetrix VMAX™ Series. FAST VP provides the ability
to dynamically respond to changing workloads within the
array and to non-disruptively relocate sub-LUN extents to
the appropriate tier (thin pool).
Enginuity operating environment version 5874 for
Symmetrix is the initial Enginuity release supporting the
Symmetrix VMAX Series with Enginuity. Enginuity
version 5874 features software enhancements such as
Auto-provisioning Groups, SRDF®/Extended Distance
Protection (EDP), Cascaded TimeFinder®/Clone copies,
and other enhancements that make Symmetrix easier to
use.
Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning™ is a Symmetrix software
feature introduced in version 5773 that simplifies storage
management and improves capacity utilization. Symmetrix
Virtual Provisioning allows storage administrators to
create a device that presents an application with more
capacity than is physically allocated to it in the storage
array.
Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning provides the following
benefits:
¾ Simplifies storage management. Users can provision
independently of physical storage, simplify the data
layout, and reduce the re-provisioning steps required
to support capacity growth.
¾ Improves capacity utilization with the reduction of
allocated-but-unused storage. This has additional
power efficiency benefits.
¾ Includes potential performance improvements for
certain application workloads that benefit from wide
striping. (Details on this will be made available in
technical notes and white papers.)
The following conditions promote the best use of
Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning:
¾ “General purpose” performance requirements.
¾ To accommodate growth more easily:
December 2010 Virtual Provisioning
ƒ Use predictable and controllable growth for
application(s) bound to a pool.
ƒ Reduce steps to add physical storage to a pool.
¾ To improve capacity utilization:
ƒ Share a pool with multiple applications.
ƒ See individual file system and database allocation
methods (for example, auto-extension) for details.
¾ Examples:
ƒ Document/media repositories
ƒ Test/development and QA
Product description
Symmetrix thin devices are logical devices used in many of
the same ways that Symmetrix devices have traditionally
been used. Unlike regular Symmetrix devices, thin devices
do not need to have physical storage completely allocated
at the time the device is created and presented to a host.
The physical storage used to supply disk space to thin
devices comes from a thin storage pool, which is
comprised of devices called data devices.
When users perform a write to a portion of the thin device
for which physical storage has not yet been allocated, the
Symmetrix array allocates only the physical storage for
that portion of the thin device. The minimum possible
amount of additional physical storage is allocated,
reducing unnecessary consumption. The minimum amount
of physical storage that users can allocate for the dedicated
use of a thin device at one time is referred to as the thin
device extent, also known as a “chunk,” which is 768 KB
or 12 Symmetrix tracks.
When more storage is required to service existing or future
thin devices, users can add data devices to existing thin
storage pools. You can also create and associate new, thin
devices with existing storage pools.
With Enginuity 5874, you can now shrink thin pools non-
disruptively, helping reuse space to improve efficiency.
This is enabled by support for the draining of data devices
with 5874 Enginuity for Symmetrix VMAX arrays.
With Enginuity 5874, thin pools can also be rebalanced.
Automated pool rebalancing allows the user to redistribute
the allocated extents evenly across all enabled data devices
in the pool. This enables a small number of data devices to
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be used to expand a pool without compromising wide
striping. By expanding pools in smaller increments, users
can save capacity and reduce TCO.
Enginuity 5874 also provides users with the ability to de-
allocate thin device extents that have never been written to
by a host, or that contain all zeros. This feature, called
space reclamation, is an extension of the existing Virtual
Provisioning space de-allocation mechanism. Space
reclamation makes unneeded but previously allocated thin
device extents available for new extent allocation
operations.
Virtual Provisioning now operates on all the RAID types
supported by Symmetrix, including RAID 1, RAID 5, and
RAID 6. You can use thin devices with many existing
Symmetrix local and remote replication products. This
includes thin-to-thin replication with TimeFinder/Snap, Figure 1. A thin device and thin storage pool
TimeFinder/Clone, Open Replicator, SRDF/Synchronous,
In Figure 1, the Symmetrix VMAX array services host
SRDF/Asynchronous, and SRDF/Data Mobility.
writes to a thin device, while allocating storage to the thin
When using thin devices with TimeFinder/Clone on device from the data devices in the associated storage pool.
Symmetrix DMX™, both the source and the target devices The storage is allocated in chunks taken from members of
must be thin devices. This is true for both establish and the pool in a round-robin fashion.
restore operations. With TimeFinder/Snap, the target of a
snap operation with a thin source device is a virtual device
(VDEV), just as it is with regular Symmetrix devices. With
Enginuity 5874 on Symmetrix VMAX, TimeFinder/Clone
supports clone sessions between thick and thin devices.
This “thick-to-thin replication” feature enables users to
copy only host-written tracks from the source volume over
to the target thin volume, helping to reduce TCO.
You may use thin devices as sources or targets of Open
Replicator copy operations. If a thin device is the source of
the data, zeroes are sent to the target device for any
unmapped portions of the source device. If a thin device is
the target of an Open Replicator copy operation, all data
must be sent to the thin device, leaving the target thin
device fully allocated. In this case, you can use space
reclamation in order to “thin out” the target volume.
®
Figure 2. A thin device and thin storage pool with
PowerPath Migration Enabler 5.3 and Open Migrator for added data devices
Windows can sparsely replicate standard volumes to thin
volumes, ensuring that the thin volume’s allocated capacity In Figure 2, as the free space in the thin storage pool
is equal only to the total capacity of tracks actually becomes exhausted, new data devices may be added to the
containing data in the source volume. thin storage pool.

New in Enginuity 5875 is the ability of Open Replicator

“pull” sessions using thin control devices on a VMAX to
perform on-the-fly zero data detection, eliminating the
need to run space reclamation post-replication to “thin out”
the thin control volume.
Enginuity 5875 also adds on-the-fly zero data detection for
SRDF migrations originating from thick devices located in
Symmetrix arrays running Enginuity 5873 or above to thin
devices in a Symmetrix VMAX.

December 2010 Virtual Provisioning Page 2


Figure 3. Adding thin devices
In Figure 3, new thin devices that will use the same thin
storage pool can also be added.
Monitoring
Users have the ability to monitor the space consumption of
thin devices and thin pools on a real-time basis, either
through the Symmetrix Management Console (SMC)
graphical interface or through the CLI. This includes
threshold alerts that can, for example, automatically trigger
a command-line script that adds data devices to expand
pool capacity when you exceed a certain threshold.
Syntax
You can use either SMC or the CLI (the symconfigure
CLI command) to create and configure the devices and
pools used for Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning. EMC
recommends using SMC as the primary method of
managing and monitoring Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning.
The following examples of CLI syntax may be used to
configure Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning:
¾ Create a thin storage pool:
create pool HR type = thin;
¾ Create thin storage devices:
create dev count=3, config=2-Way_Mir,
attribute=datadev, emulation=FBA,
size=1000;
¾ Add thin storage devices to the pool and enable them:
add dev 0101:0103 to pool HR
type = thin,
member_state = ENABLE;
¾ Composite command to add and enable thin data
devices to an existing thin storage pool:
create dev count=3, config=2-Way_Mir,
attribute=datadev, emulation=FBA,
December 2010 Virtual Provisioning
size=1000, in pool HR,
member_state = ENABLE;
¾ Create thin devices:
create dev count=3, config=TDEV,
emulation=FBA, size=1000;
¾ Bind thin devices to a thin storage pool:
bind tdev 0104:0106 to pool HR;
¾ Composite command to create thin devices and bind
them to an existing thin storage pool:
create dev count=3, config=TDEV,
emulation=FBA, size=1000,
bind to pool HR;
Requirements and dependencies
Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning requires Enginuity version
5773 or later and Solutions Enabler version 6.5 or later. It
is currently available for use with open systems (FBA)
devices only.
Packaging
Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning requires Enginuity version
5773 and Solutions Enabler version 6.5 or later.
Limitations and restrictions
Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning is not available for CKD
devices.
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