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How to Change FA Ports on an Existing VMAX PortGroup

Introduction

You have a situation on your VMAX where the port utilization is up and you would like to move the FA ports assigned to a PortGroup moved to a lesser utilized set on you switch. In this post we will cover how to move to a new port group and fix the mapping of all attached devices on your EMC VMAX. We will cover unmapping ports and fixing zoning.

Process

First part of the puzzle to create new zones for the new ports we are moving the system to use.

There are several steps we need to accomplish to add new FA Ports and remove the old ones from our PortGroup.

Add the new ports to the existing port group

symaccess -sid 1234-type port -name MYCLUSTER_PG add -dirport 9F:0,11F:0,6F:0,8F:0
Now we can remove the ports
 symaccess -sid 1234 -name MYCLUSTER_PG -type port -dirport 5F:0,7F:0,10F:0,12F:0 remove

The final configuration piece is to unmap the FA ports to the Storage devices. We can retrieve the devices by using the storage group.

symdev -sid 1234 write_disable 12C5 -SA 5F -p 0

Repeat the command for each port you want to disable

symdev -sid 1234 write_disable 12C6 -SA 5F -P 0
symdev -sid 1234 write_disable 12C6 -SA 7F -P 0
symdev -sid 1234 write_disable 12C6 -SA 10F -P 0
symdev -sid 1234 write_disable 12C6 -SA 12F -P 0
Check the device to see that the port is write disable.

symdev -sid 1234 show 12C6

Front Director Paths (8):
 {
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 POWERPATH DIRECTOR PORT LUN
 --------- ---------- ---- -------- ---------
 PdevName Type Type Num Sts VBUS TID SYMM Host
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Not Visible N/A FA 05F:0 WD 000 00 02B N/A
 Not Visible N/A FA 06F:0 RW 000 00 012 N/A

So now we see FA 05F:0 is in a disabled state and we can now proceed with unmapping the Ports from the device.

Using the symconfigure command unmap the device from the dirport. We will need

symconfigure -sid 1234 -cmd "unmap dev 12C5 from dir 5F:0;" -v commit

Conclusion

We see that we can add and disable FA ports for a device with ease and no outages.

3 Responses to “How to Change FA Ports on an Existing VMAX PortGroup”

  1. Alo says:

    Hi

    It seems that using Unisphere for VMAX for this task is even better choice because when removing ports from port group you can select “unmap” to unmap any affected volumes from their respective ports. Its just quiker and easier in the case when you have lot of devices.

    Alo

    • newlife007 says:

      You are correct Unisphere for VMAX does allow you to do this in one easy step but command line is also a good option especially if you are making changes and not totally removing the devices. In my case I had 8 FA ports assigned and needed to remove 4 of the ports so command line was the best option for my situation.

  2. Nayab says:

    Nice explanation..

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