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by Jon | Published November 11, 2015 | 3 comments

R E C E N T P O S TS

Increasing the storage capacity of a Data Domain

is usually a matter of adding an additional disk My brain will be melting at

shelf to the Data Domain head. Upon  connecting Storage Field Day 18!

the additional enclosure your new disks will be in Reassign Isilon node IP

an Unknown state. This does not necessarily mean addresses; go OCD!

there’s anything wrong with the topology of the Data Domain migration and
system, but just indicates the disks aren’t in use retaining your system name and

just yet. This is however easily fixed with a couple IP addresses

of CLI commands. Isilon node loses network

connectivity a er reboot

Reformat an Isilon node and try

Cabling the new enclosures again!

Step one is a physical action: you need to install the enclosures in the racks and cable them to
the Data Domain controller. In this post we’ve got a DD2500 with three ES30 enclosures, each
filled to the brim with 3TB NL-SAS drives. The Data Domain DD2500 controller has two ports
(3A and 3C) for a total of 1 loop which can house max 4 ES30 enclosures with 2TB disk or 3
ES30 enclosures with 3TB disks. Obviously this is the max supported configuration of this Invest Your
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The enclosures are connected to the Data Domain and other enclosures in a redundant loop
fashion.

B U Y M E A L I F T PA S S

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TA G S

CLARiiON cloud

datacenter

Dell EMC

disaster recovery

drive failure EFD

EMC EMC Elect

EMC World 2013

event FAST Cache

FAST VP flash

I/O Infiniband

Isilon Isilon network

Pay close attention to the cabling, because messing it up will result in an non-functional loop
Las Vegas MCx
and thus no storage expansion!
NAS networking

It is important to note that, should you be installing enclosures in a multi-loop system like a Nimble Storage

DD990, it’s important to fill up one loop first before adding enclosures to a second loop. In a NL-SAS NL-Series

system like VNX you would be trying to balance the enclosures over the buses; not so in a Data performance
Domain! The exception is that you cannot mix ES20 and ES30 enclosures on one loop RecoverPoint
and can’t mix ES30 NL-SAS and SAS shelves on one loop.
Replication

Double check your work a erwards with the enclosure show summary command: all scale-out NAS

enclosures should be online. Software Defined

Storage

solid-state SSD

storage

Storage Field Day

Storage Field Day 8

Storage Field Day 10

Discover those unknown disks Tech Field Day

travel

The disks aren’t added to the Data Domain troubleshooting

automatically but will show up as Unknown Unisphere

disks.  There’s two commands you can use to list vault drive VMware
the disks: storage show summary or the slightly VNX write cache
more fancy disk show state. I prefer the latter…
XtremIO

First step is checking you’ve got the necessary

capacity licenses installed; there should be one
per ES30 enclosure. You can add them on the CLI with the license add <license key> command
or via the GUI under System Settings > Licenses.

You will first have to add the enclosures to the active tier with the storage add enclosure
<enclosureid> command. Rerunning the disk show state command will now show the disks for
that enclosure as available. Rerun the command for all remaining enclosures to make all the

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drives available. Verify that there are no more unknown

disks in the system.

Expand the Data

Domain file system
With the disks available, it’s time to add them to the file
system. If there’s no file system created on the Data
Domain just yet, you can create one with the filesys
create command; else (in our case) use the filesys
expand command to… well… expand the file system. The CLI for Data Domain is so confusing,
isn’t it?!

Running the disk show state command at this

point, you will see that the system has
automatically created spares where necessary.
Almost there, we’re not completely done yet!

Test that system!

Before you run o and start using that extra capacity, we need to make sure all the SAS
connectivity is in good order and fit to handle the data that’s going to be passed over it. First
up, we’ll show the ES shelf topology with the enclosure show topology command. With a bit of
puzzling you will be able to verify remotely if the engineer installing the hardware did a good
job and used the correct ports.

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Update 2017: this screenshot actually shows an incorrect configuration: ports 3a and 3b are
used, which are on the same IO processor. The DD2500 shelves should be connected to ports
3a and 3c, or a permanent SAS back-end cabling error will appear a er upgrading to DD-OS 5
or higher

The last step is a stress-test of the connectivity: run the enclosure test topology <portnumber>
duration <time in minutes>. Five minutes per port should be plenty; the ports are listed in the
show topology command. Check the output of the command: if there are no errors, the
system is good to go.

Now go deduplicate some data!

Data Domain storage

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3 Comments FastStorage 
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Rizwan • 2 years ago

Hi Jon, what is the command to add disk in enclosure and 10gbe 2 ports io module. Thank you.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Joe • 3 years ago

Jon, I am adding a ES30 shelf to a DD2500. In the wiring diagram the last shelf is connected to
Port 3A on the Head, so does that mean I would move the current connection from the Existing
(last) shelf to the New shelf for the Port 3A connection since the new ES30 will be the last shelf in
the loop. Can This be done online ????
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Jon Klaus Mod > Joe • 3 years ago

Hi Joe, that's correct, you need to temporarily break that last connection and move it to the
newly added shelf. It can be done online; be aware that you only break 1 connection
though. If you break both of the connections (i.e. unplug one or more enclosures), your
filesystem will go down. Also keep in mind the loop limits: don't mix ES20 and ES30
enclosures on one loop and respect the maximum number of enclosures on one loop
(depends on drive size, see post above). Good luck!
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