EMC E20-526 XtremIO Solutions and Design Specialist Exam for Technology Architects Exam Practice Test

It is related to TRIM/UNMAP, which is enabled per default in Server 2012(R2).

References:https://serverfault.com/questions/679211/quick-format-of-lun-in-server-2012r2-hosted-on-a-thin-provisioned-san-vol-take

The EMC RecoverPoint family provides cost-effective, local continuous data protection (CDP), continuous remote replication (CRR), and continuous local and remote replication (CLR) that allows for any-point-in-time data recovery and a new "snap and replicate" mechanism for local and remote replication (XRP).

Native replication support for XtremIO

The native replication support for XtremIO is designed for high-performance and low-latency applications that provides a low Recovery Point Objective of one minute or less and immediate RTO.

The benefits include:

• Block level remote or local replication
• Asynchronous local and remote replication
• Policy-based replication to enable optimizing storage and network resources, while obtaining desired RPO and RTO
• Application-aware integration

With VMware ESX 5.5, the VMware hypervisor cannot work with LUNs that use a logical block size of 4K. When using VMware, be sure to specify Normal (512 LBs) from your XtremIO array.

References:https://gruffdba.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/4k-logical-block-size-size-fails-on-vmware/

The block size for both Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) and Cluster Synchronization Services (CSS) voting files are 512 bytes. I/O operations to these file objects are therefore sized as a multiple of 512 bytes.

This is of no consequence since the best practice with XtremIO is to create volumes with 512e formatting.

References:https://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h13497-oracle-best-practices-xtremio-wp.pdf , page 22

XtremIO Data Protection (XDP) doesn’t require any configuration, nor does it need hot spare drives. Insteadit uses "hot spaces" – free space in the array.

References:https://www.emc.com/collateral/white-paper/h13036-wp-xtremio-data-protection.pdf , page 23

References:https://docs.openstack.org/juno/config-reference/content/XtremIO-cinder-driver.html#xtremio-management-ip

The first step is to re-install the XMS image, in the event it is a physical XMS then you may install an image via a USB flash drive or for a virtual XMS simply deploy the provided VMware OVA image.

The following step is to upload the XMS software to the images directory of the XMS and login with install mode ……..

Once logged into the XMS console with xinstall then perform the following sequence of steps:

1. Configuration

5. Perform XMS installation only

11. Run XMS Recovery

Options to choose when running the “XMS Recovery”:

References:https://davidring.ie/2015/02/20/emc-xtremio-redeploying-xms-xtremio-management-server/

Second write workload IOPS = 2 GB/s divided by 128 kB = 2 x1,073,741,824 / (128 x 1,024) = 16384 IOPs.

Total IOPS required would be 150,000, from the first workload, plus 16384, totaling 166384.

A 2 X-Brick cluster provides 300K Read/write IOPS so it would be adequate.

Storage capacity and performance scale linearly, such that two X-Bricks supply twice the IOPS, four X-Bricks supply four times the IOPS, six X-Bricks supply six times the IOPS and eight X-Bricks supply eight times the IOPS of the single X-Brick configuration.

Note: Choose an EMC XtremIO system and scale out linearly by adding more XtremIO X-Bricks.

References: https://store.emc.com/en-us/Product-Family/EMC-XtremIO-Products/EM C-XtremIO-All-Flash-Scale-Out-Array/p/EMC-XtremIO-Flash-Scale-Out

The XtremIO's RESTful API allows HTTPS-based interface for automation, orchestration, query and provisioning of the system. With the API, third party applications can be used to control and fully administer the array.

Normally you would access the API using some form of programming/scripting language, such as Python or Perl. However for the purposes of learning or testing concepts there are a number of tools that work better, such as HTTPRrequester and curl.

* Curl is a command-line tool that exists in all Linux distributions, and is available for most other Unix OSes as well as Windows.

To use curl to access XtremIO you’ll need to pass it a few options, such as the username/password to access the array (any valid account on the XtremIO XMS will work), the URL of the API, and potentially a few options such as -k to tell curl not to validate the SSL certificate (presuming you don’t have a valid certificate installed), and -s (silent) to stop curl displaying it’s progress as it downloads the response.

* HTTPRequester is a browser extension that is available for both Chrome and Firefox.

As with for curl, you’ll need to provide a username/password, which is done by clicking on the “Authentication…” box, which adds two boxes below the URL for the username and the password.

References:https://blog.docbert.org/using-the-xtremio-rest-api-part-1/