EMC Symmetrix Management Console (SMC for Symmetrix V-Max Systems)

The Symmetrix Management Console is a very important step towards allowing customers take control of their Symmetrix V-Max Systems. With the new  Symmetrix V-Max  comes a new version of Symmetrix Management Console allowing customers to manage their EMC Symmetrix V-Max Systems through a GUI web browser interface with tons of new added features and wizards for usability.  

The Symmetrix Management Console was developed back in the day as a GUI to view customers Symmetrix DMX environment, over years it has evolved more to be a functional and operational tool to interface the machine for data gathering but also to perform changes. EMC Solutions Enabler Symcli is a CLI based interface to the DMX and V-Max Systems, but the SMC complements the CLI by allowing customers to perform more or less similar functions through a GUI. The looks & feels of SMC also resemble ECC (EMC Control Center) and customers sometime refer it as a ECC-lite (SMC).  

Some of the important features and benefits of the SMC for V-Max are listed below:

1. Allows customers to manage multiple EMC Symmetrix V-Max Systems
2. Increase customer management efficiency by using Symmetrix Management Console to automate or perform functions with a few set of clicks
3. The Symmetrix Management Console 7.0 only works with Symmetrix V-Max systems
4. The Symmetrix Management Console is installed on the Service Processor of the V-Max System and can also be installed on a host in the SAN environment.
5. Customers can now do trending, performance reporting, planning and consolidation using SMC
6. SMC will help customers reduce their TCO with V-Max Systems
7. It takes minutes to install. Windows environment running a Windows Server 2003 along with IIS would be the best choice.
8. The interface the customers work on is a GUI. It has the looks and feels of ECC and the Console also integrates with ECC.
9. New Symmetrix V-Max systems are configured and managed through the Symmetrix Management Console.
10. SMC also manages user, host permissions and access controls
11. Alert Management
12. From a free product, SMC now becomes a licensed product, which the customers will  have to pay for


Virtual LUN Technology in works using a wizard

13. It allows customers to perform functions related to configuration changes like creating and mapping masking devices, changing device attributes, flag settings, etc
14. Perform replication functions using SMC like Clone, Snap, Open Replicator, etc
15. SMC enables Virtual Provisioning with the Symmetrix V-Max arrays
16. Enables Virtual LUN technology for automated policies and tiering.
17. Auto Provisioning Group technology is offered through wizards in SMC
18. Dynamic Cache Partitioning: Allocates and deallocates cache based on policies and utilization.
19. Symmetrix Priority Controls
20. From the SMC, customers can now launch SPA (Symmetrix Performance Analyzer), this is more on the lines of Workload Analyzer which is a standard component of ECC Suite. This allows customers to view their storage & application performance & monitoring. SPA will can be obtained as a Add-on product from EMC based on licensing.
21. The SMC gives the customer capabilities for Discovery, Configuration, Monitoring, Administration and Replication Management.
22. SMC can be obtained from EMC Powerlink or through your account manager from EMC if you have an active contract in place with EMC for hardware/software maintenance or if your systems are under warranty.

Highly recommended management tool for SAN Admins and yea it’s not free anymore for V-Max Systems.    

To read the previous blog post on  Symmetrix Management Console, as it relates to Symmetrix DMX-3 and DMX-4 machines.

A nice technical post by Steve Todd on  V-Max and Symmetrix Management Console

A post by StorageZilla on  Auto Provisioning Groups with SMC

Note: Both the pictures in this blog post have been derived from EMC’s Symmetrix Management Console Data Sheet.