HPE Storage Users Group

My company is migrating off EMC Clariion (CX4) arrays to 3PAR (sorry not sure which model yet). In general, has anyone done this before and could you explain any tools, practices and issues you may have encountered along the way. We have never worked with 3PAR before so any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

I have migrated Clariion CX600/700 to 3PAR. There are a couple gotchas with multipathing.

Pre-windows2008, Powerpath will not co-exist with 3PAR MPIO, you have to pick one or the other and be single attached to one system during the migration. Unless you use Symantec Storage Foundations (Veritas Volume Manager) on windows, then it handles multipathing for multiple vendors.

AIX was easy. PowerPath and native MPIO coexisted and we used standard LVM tools to migrate.

For the actual transfer of data on windows, we did a host by host plan, using the best method per host. On some systems we used windows to mirror a LUN, sometimes we used robocopy for an offline copy. We used EMC's Open MigratorLM (Free) for our larger cluster servers that could not be copied within a regular maintenance window. That tool is a bit more complex, but allowed us to migrate/sync data while the system was in production. It all just depended on what the available outage windows were per host.

A typical windows migration would involve:
Provisioning a new 3PAR lun with a single path only.
Copying the data from the old EMC lun to the new 3PAR
removing the EMC luna
removing powerpath
installing 3PAR MPIO
adding additional paths to 3par.

Thank you sir! The info is much appreciated.

I tested out EMC Open Migrator. It works well.
Installs like an antivirus client inserting itself in the disk access stack above the MPIO and hardware layer but below the filesystem interpretation layer.
In the newer versions no reboot is required after attaching to the volumes just a disk rescan within the Open Migrator MMC.
One concern I see is there is an option which is default to verify consistency after mirroring the volumes. This leads me to wonder why a verification is needed in the first place if Open Migrator is reliable in mirroring disk sectors.
The interface is fairly intuitive though sometimes slow to respond. The latency is likely more of a feature of MMC then Open Migrator.
One thing to note is, once in sync, there is no notification that the system is ready to automatically do the disk letter reassignment on next reboot.
This is fully explained in the help files, but should really be evident from the GUI as well.
DO test this out on a disk migration test system to get familiarity before running on a prod system.

over looks good. It provides essentially disk mirroring and automated disk letter reassignment as well as addressing mount point reassignments.

Hi,

To the original poster.

After time with the 3Par. Could you give feedback on the following;

SAN migration process
NAS migration process ( if any )
Performance of SAN
Performance of NAS gateway ( if any )
Any gotca's from your experience.

The reason I am asking is I will be potentially facing the same situation in a couple of months time and want to stand on the shoulder of giants

We are doing the migrations now from EMC CX4's to 3Par using SANCOPY as our method of transfer. So far, so good but we have not migrated NAS yet (rumor had it we were going to use Isilon) or VM's. It will become interesting when it comes time to migrate to those. We did have some issues with the 3par hardware (lost node) and the support was not great in comparision to EMC's but overall I find the 3par system to be very easy to use and understand. It takes a little more time to get the host to register correctly (we use all SAN boot disks) but that time is easily made up when it comes to allocating the disks later. I also like the remote copy features and the ease of expandtions. I will update the post with further info when we get to the really interesting stuff.

wgentle wrote:We are doing the migrations now from EMC CX4's to 3Par using SANCOPY as our method of transfer. So far, so good but we have not migrated NAS yet (rumor had it we were going to use Isilon) or VM's. It will become interesting when it comes time to migrate to those. We did have some issues with the 3par hardware (lost node) and the support was not great in comparision to EMC's but overall I find the 3par system to be very easy to use and understand. It takes a little more time to get the host to register correctly (we use all SAN boot disks) but that time is easily made up when it comes to allocating the disks later. I also like the remote copy features and the ease of expandtions. I will update the post with further info when we get to the really interesting stuff.

We migrated all NAS from EMC to NetApp using F5 ARX's. They weren't easy and we did yank them after the migration, but they did the trick.

Performed side-by-side migration from CX-400 to 3Par F400 on Windows 2008R2 SP1
works like a charm due to co-existence with powerpath:
-Install 3Par host explorer software and configure MPIO
-present Volumes to hosts and format
-Transfer data from EMC volumes to 3Par volumes
-removed powerpath and EMC volumes from hosts

For offline migration we used a simple Linux box (a desktop) with a SuSE Enteprise Server Linux which would "see" each storage through an HBA. In out case it was an EVA 5000 to 3Par.

Then the standard dd linux command .

No issues with multipath, simple and cheap (=0).

ilv wrote:For offline migration we used a simple Linux box.

I wish I had a "Like" button similar to face book.

On that note, for an offline migration, you may have been able to simplify the process by booting the server off a CloneZilla live CD and using that for disk cloning. Less zoning that way... and you get the horse power of your server instead of a desktop. I've used this method to migrate local C: drives to SAN boot drives.