Create Equallogic Volumes with Firmware 7.0.1

After updating Equallogic to 7.0.1. The first thing you will notice is the look.

.

For those of you will other Dell products, this will probably look familiar as Dell seems to be updating all of their products to have the same “look”

However, I am not really here to talk about how it looks there are some cool new things when you create a new volume so I wanted to talk about this.

Let’s Create a New Volume

Although this first screen looks pretty similar, you might notice the Folder option, which allows you to organize Volume logically just like you might use VM folders in vSphere.

This screen really hasn’t change much, just pick how much space you want the new volume to have.

3 – Define iSCSI access points is where the money is at. Previously in Equallogic, you had to define each and every permission to access the volume for each individual volume. NO MORE!. Now you can simply create an Access Policy which has your permissions in it.

This could be what iSCSI initiators are allowed on the volume, which IPs are allowed to access the volume, and even CHAP settings. You can now do this once, and then when creating the volume you simply say which policy you want and be done with it. Here I used “NewAccessPolicy”, which is defined in the access policies section. But let’s look at it real quick.

So when I added “NewAccessPolicy” to TestVolume, those three initiators get access to the volume. Easy Peasy

Along with selecting an access policy, you will see you can also select to “Copy access controls from another volume”. This is pretty much exactly how it sounds. You select a volume and what access is defined for that volume will be added to the new volume. Another nice feature.

512bytes or 4k? As it says, 4k is not support by everyone. Athough I am not a storage expert, and don’t know too much about 4k, my basic understanding is 4k is a similar premise as JumboFrames for networking. When in doubt stick with 512bytes.

And we finally made it to the completion screen informing us of all of our selections before we finalize and actually create the volume.

So far 7.0.1 is making my life much easier.

Do you think the new Access Policies would be beneficial to you?