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DMX-4 Interview Questions What is the difference between DMX-3 and DMX-4? What is the difference between DMX-4 and DMX-950? How many Cache directors, Front-end directors and Back-end directors we can use in DMX-4? What are the different types of Front-end directors and the purpose of each one? What is the FAN-IN and FAN-OUT ratio of DMX-4? Explain Rule 17 in DMX? What are the Management Tools for DMX? What are the major components of System Bay and Storage Bay? Explain Enginuity Operation layers How do you calculate number of cylinders for 50GB LUN? What is the maximum hyper size in DMX-4? How many hypers can create in a Single disk? How many members can contain in one meta? How many LUN IDs available per port? What Dynamic LUN addressing? How do you add a new member to the existing Meta? What is stripping and what is Concatenating? What are the DMX-4 supported disk types, no. of disks and maximum capacity? Briefly explain the DMX-4 supported Device types? What are the RAID levels DMX-4 Supports?
What are Vault drives and Hot Spare? What is Preview, Prepare and Commit while using Symconfigure command? How do you check the back-end Operations on Symmetrix Array? How do you check the failed disks in the Symmetrix Array? What are the service states of a device How do you reserve the devices? What is Tiering and how do you create the Disk Groups How do you check the free space by Disk group and Array as whole? How do you check the particular disk is connected to which DA Port and it is resides in particular DAE? What is drive looping? How do you check the particular device is connected to which Host? How do you check the total allocated storage of a Host? Host is unable to see the storage, what may be the problem? What is VCMDB and How do you take the backup?
VCM Database
The Symmetrix Volume Configuration Management (VCM) database stores access configurations that are used to grant host access to logical devices in a Symmetrix storage array. The VCM database resides on a special system resource logical device, referred to as the VCMDB device, on each Symmetrix storage array. Information stored in the VCM database includes, but is not limited to:
Host and storage World Wide Names SID Lock and Volume Visibility settings
Native logical device data, such as the front-end directors and storage ports to which they are mapped
Masking operations performed on Symmetrix storage devices result in modifications to the VCM database in the Symmetrix array. The VCM database can be backed up, restored, initialized and activated. The Symmetrix SDM Agent must be running in order to perform VCM database operations (except deleting backup files). Regarding the VCMDB, now this DB resides on the the two SFS (Symmetrix File System) volumes that are automatically created when binfile is build. You can identify them easily on bin. A small volume called still called VCM must still be created but it will be used just as a normal gatekeeper
How do you list the Hosts which are connected to particular director port? How do you check the number of storage bays connected to the system bay and number of disks in each storage bay? How do you check the devices which are mapped to FA but not masked to any host? How do you check the login hosts in the Array? What is pre check list to assign to storage to the host? Explain step by step to provide storage to the Host? What is Thin Provisioning? How do you create thin pools and thin devices? What are the steps for storage reclamation? How many mirror positions RAID-1 and RAID-5 will occupy? How do you increase the mirror positions? How do you convert the One device type to another? What is FA Port Flag and how do you set the FA port flags? How do you setup the Symmetrix metrics?
How do you check the configured environmental variables? Can windows, Linux, Solaris share the same FA in DMX? What are the External locks and how to check? How to monitor performance of EMC Symmetrix? How do you check performance statistics of a particular director port? How do you check the cache activity of selected front-end directory? How do you check the back-end I/O requests of selected disk? What are the available performance information types in SYMSTAT command? What is symmetrix optimizer and how it works? What is Symmetrix QoS and how it works? What is the purpose of Symmetrix Change Tracker? What is Dynamic Cache Partitioning? What are the logs available at host-end and on symmetrix array? How do you monitor the real time events on symmetrix array with example? How do you track the history of events on symmetrix array with example? How do you check the audit logs on symmetrix array? How do you activate the auditing on symmetrix array? What is Symmetrix ACL? Explain step by step to setup the access controls on symmetrix array? How do you take the backup of ACLs? What is Symmetrix User Authorization? Explain step by step to setup user authorization on symmetrix array? How do you perform backup and restore user authorization information?
What is Read Hit and Write Miss? What is the purpose of bin file in SAPAPI database? What are the services of symcli? Explain step by step procedure to setup new host? What are the Symcli Base Management Commands? How do you prepare the Storage Capacity planning reports by host wise? What are the Symmetrix Business Continuity Tool By using what symcli command we can check the HBA details and physical details What are the business continuity tools for symmetrix array?
Common Interview Questions Tell me about your self? What are the day to day activities? What are your roles and responsibilities? What is the first thing you will do at office? What is your storage environment? What are the SAN, Storage and Replication management tools you are using? How you will monitor the Storage environment? How you will get the tickets? Explain step by step procedure to close the received ticket? When you initiate the change what are your responsibilities? Explain step by step procedure to close the received ticket?
SAN Interview Questions What is zoning? What is hard and soft zoning and Explain? What is the difference between zone and zone set? Explain step by step procedure for creating soft zoning? Explain step by step procedure for creating hard zoning? What is VSAN and how to create? What is ISL? What is F,E and FL Port? What are the management tools for Switches? How do you troubleshoot the SFP failure? How do you upgrade the firmware? What are the general switch problems?
Define Business Continuity? What are the Business Continuity tools available for symmetrix? What is RPO and RTO? What are the different types of Device Groups? What is the difference between TimeFinder Mirror and Clone? What is the advantage of TimeFinder Snapshots? What are the commands used for TimeFinder Mirror, Clone and Snapshot? Explain step by step procedure for TimeFinder Mirror Operations? What is the status of Source and Target devices at the time of Establish, Split and Restore? How many Mirrors can create with single source concurrently? What is default option while performing establish?
What is Power path Split? What is ECA (Enginuity Consistent Assist) split? What are the precautions we have to take while restoring a mirror? What is Protected BCV Establish? What is reverse split? What is Protected BCV Restore? How many BCVs can be supported in multi BCV functionality? How many BCVs can be Established concurrently to the standard volume/ Is TimeFinder Mirror Supports concurrent restores? Is the Mirror can be mounted to the source host? One device can be a member of how many device groups? Device Groups are host based or Array based? What is fore ground and back ground instant split? Explain Step by step procedure for TimeFinder Clone Operations? What are the available options with Clone Creation and Explain? What is the status of source and target devices while create, activate, restore and terminate? Can we use STDs as a target for Clone? How many CopyOnAccess session clone will support? How many concurrent Full copied session clone will support? Clone session can use BCVs as a source volume? What will happen if we establish a clone session? Explain Step by step procedure for TimeFinder Snap Operations? How many snapshots can be created from a single source volume? How many save devices can contain in a save pool? What is the recommended size of VDEV? How do you create the SAVE and VDEVs? How do you monitor the free space in Save pool? How do restore the snapshots? How the data will be stored in save devices in a save pool?
Explain Clariion architecture Hardware Models of Clariion What are the differences between Clariion CX-3 series and CX-4 Series What are the Hardware components of Clariion What are the management tools for Clariion How to Initialize Clariion Array What is Access Logix and How do you enable it? Why Access Logix has to be enabled What are Vault drives and how much capacity they use? What is CMI? Clariion Message Interface What are the I/O Operations in Clariion Use of SPs What is Storage array in Clariion?
Create Storage group How to manually restore failed paths in Clariion How do you gather SP Collects? How do you upgrade the NaviSphere Manager? What are steps to assign a LUN to existing Host? Explain step by step procedure for storage provision to the new host? How do create capacity planning reports in Clariion? What is HEAT report? How do you enter into the Engineering Mode and what are the activities we can perform in Engineering Mode? How do you create a meta LUN? Explain step by step procedure for LUN migration? What is Private LUN Pool? What is Reserved LUN Pool? How do you deregister the hosts from NaviSphere? How do you create a user and assign access rights? How do you monitor Clariion alerts? What is the recommended ration of Read and Write cache?
DMX-4 Storage Provisioning Step by Step Step by Step Procedure for storage provisioning & Reclamation in DMX-4
Storage Provisioning
Storage Reclamation
Verify the available free space symconfigure -sid SymmID [-v | -freespace [-units cylinders | MB]] list or symdisk sid 4282 list disk_group 2
Create Command file Create dev count=8, size=12394, data_member_count=3, emulation=FBA, config=RAID-5, disk_group=2;
Verify the command line syntax by performing PREVIEW using Symconfigure command Symconfigure sid 4282 f Create_hypers.txt v noprompt preview
Verify the Array readiness by performing PREPARE using Symconfigure command Symconfigure sid 4282 f Create_hypers.txt v noprompt prepare
Execute COMMIT using Symconfigure command Symconfigure sid 4282 f Create_hypers.txt v noprompt commit
Verify the newly created devices Symdev sid 4282 list noport
Form meta from dev 26CA, config=striped, stripe_size=1920; add dev 26CB:26E4 to meta 26ca;
Verify the command line syntax by performing PREVIEW using Symconfigure ommand
Mappping
Find the host connected Director and Port details symcfg sid 4282 list connections
Mappping
symmaskdb sid 4282 wwn 10000000c93f62cf dir 7d p 0 add devs 26ca nop Symmask sid 4282 refresh
Unmasking
Write Disable
o
Write Disable the devices before unmapping from the Director and from port
Un-mapping
o
Dissolve meta
o
Deleting hypers
To delete the hypers create a cmd/txt file with the following line.
SymCli 7 Commands brief description Symmetrix Command Line Interface Commands Brief Description SYMCLI BASE Commands
symapierr - Used to translate SYMAPI error code numbers into SYMAPI error messages.
symcfg - Discover or display Symmetrix configuration information. Refresh the host's Symmetrix database file or remove Symmetrix info from the file. Can also be used to view or release a 'hanging' Symmetrix exclusive lock.
symchg - Monitor changes to Symmetrix devices or to logical objects stored on Symmetrix devices.
symcli - Provides the version number and a brief description of the commands included in the Symmetrix Command Line
symdev - Perform operations on a device given the device's Symmetrix name. Can also be used to view Symmetrix device locks.
symstat - Display statistics information about a Symmetrix, a Director, a device group, or a device.
symreturn - Used for supplying return codes in pre-action and post-action script files.
symclone - Perform Clone control operations on a device group or on a device within the device group.
symfast - Administer Symmetrix FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) policies, associations, and the FAST Controller.
symmaskdb - Backup, Restore, Initialize or Show the contents of the device masking database.
symmigrate - Migrates the physical disk space associated with a Symmetrix device to a different data protection scheme, or to disks with different performance characteristics.
symmir - Perform BCV control operations on a device group or on a device within the device group.
symrdf - Perform RDF control operations on a device group or on a device within the device group.
symreplicate - Perform automated, consistent replication of data given a pre-configured SRDF/Timefinder setup.
symsnap - Perform Symmetrix Snap control operations on a device group or on devices in a device file.
symhostfs - Display information about a host File, Directory, or host File System.
symrslv - Display detailed Logical to Physical mapping information about a logical object stored on Symmetrix devices.