How To Install and Configure EMC Fast Cache on a Clariion

How to install and configure EMC Fast Cache on a Clariion

The first step is to make sure you are using Unisphere and are on Flare 30. Without flare 30 none of these steps are possible.

Then connect your EFD disks, for me it was 5 100 gig flash disks, which will build 2 raid 1 mirrors and 1 hotspare providing us 200 gigs of fast cache.

Once your fast software arrives you will receive it on cds. Each cd contains a .ena file which you will need to copy from the cd into a folder on the computer that you will be using unisphere service manager. My default location that I had to copy the software to was C:\EMC\repository\Downloads

Then from inside Unisphere click on Launch USM under Service Tasks














emc support told me to just select all 4 disk as raid 1, and behind the scenes it will create 2 raid 1 mirrors.

this next screen may give you a scare, it did for me and I called support. It should only disable SP cache for a few seconds/minutes as it rebuilds the memory map on the ram to include the SSD disks. For me it only took about 2 minutes in total and didn't appear to impact performance.


Now you should see that it is enabled, and you also need to assign a hotspare

select manual and select the SSD disk as the hotspare

now go to the properties of the LUN that you want to enable fast cache on, and check fast cache, the enable caching should also automatically check itself off, hit apply and sit back and let fast cache do the work for you.


You can use navi analyzer to view Fast cache statistics to ensure that it is working properly.

Good monitoring/alerting solution for san storage and vmware

One thing that our current monitoring solution solar winds orion was lacking was vmware and storage reporting. Solarwinds decided to fix this issue by acquiring a company called tek-tools. Right now they are two separate products however in the near future they will be fully integrated into a single pane of glass.

Below are some screenshots of the tek-tools product and they are pretty self explanitory. It can monitor and alert on the following, esx host cpu/memory/disk space etc, esx guest cpu/memory/disk space, datastore useage, datastore forecasting, san lun performance, just to name a few. Another thing that I am very pleased with the graphical information it can show me in my EMC Clarrion SAN (one thing navisphere reporting can't provide you with). This seems to do an excellent job of completing the circle for monitoring of your virtual environment and san storage, and once integrated into orion it will provide full monitoring of everything in your environment!