So in the past few weeks I have been playing with the new EMC Celerra that my company purchased. As of right now I can say that creating CIFS servers and sharing storage is pretty straight forward. Other areas, not so much.
Because the unit is new and I decided to get it setup all by myself, asking questions where needed, some things are not as rosy as I had hoped they would be. The biggest issue I have right now is domain joins. It seems they fail all the time. I am working on this issue and hope to have it resolved this week.
The next issue that finds me a bit troubled is migration. Sure there is copy and paste, but that smells of inefficiency to me. I am trying to chase down some of the migration tools I have read about but the EMC-Copy utility doesn’t seem to get the job done (or I am using it wrong).
If all goes well, the users will be presented with the new storage in a week or so and then it is on to home directory “stuff”.
To move or let them move… that is the question
I am on the fence when it comes to Home Directories. Yes we need them, yes they need to live on the Celerra, but who gets to be the one to put them there. My initial thought was to shove all the data over in a migration and not worry about it, but that is not effective use of storage. Keeping whatever is out there for as long as whenever is not a good move. I am planning to e-mail the user community and let them know that they need to clean up their rooms by <insert deadline here> so that the useable data can be migrated.
This will save initial storage at the outset and allow everyone to be under their quota. Users under quota are a good thing, because that way the hard limit wont hit right away and can actually be enforced.
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I am leaning toward a set amount of storage per user, across the board. This means that my co-workers need to reduce what is stored. That should make for an interesting few weeks. Some will have no problem as they do not use much now, some will have limit issues right away.
Either way, I think that will suit us best until we can determine needs and usage to allow additional shelves to be installed.
