EMC Clariion CX3 not supported in 5.1, but will it work?

[Gewehr_43]

Hi all.  We are preparing to move to ESXI 5.1 from 4.1U2 in the next few weeks.  We have an old EMC Clariion CX3-20c that I've been using as a test box for some time.  It is not our primary array (those are Equallogics) and is only used for testing and other completely non-critical uses. 

The HCL for 5.1 shows that nothing in the CX3 family is supported.  My questions are, will it still work and if so, are there any tweaks required?  I'm okay with it being unsupported since it serves such a non critical role, so long as I can get it connected.  I'm just trying to squeeze some more life out this older array. 

We are connecting via software iscsi initiators, no fiber channel stuff. 

Thanks!

[mcowger]

Its not on the HCL because we don't test N-2 gear....

There are many people using them and it does work fine.  No tweaks needed (at leastm not different than vSphere 4.x)

[Jayden56]

Hi

Welcome to the communities.

As one of college explained its not in HCL & complete depend upon your skill & Hardware.

you may test & post if any error comes.

"You must not lose faith in humanity".

[Gewehr_43]

All righty.  Thanks, guys.  Much what I expected.  I'll give it a shot when the time comes and see what happens.  I'll update this post with results, but it could be a few months. 

[edinburgh1874 · Accepted solution]

We have one and use it with ESXi 5.1...it's stable with MRU and failover mode 1, no round robin available on CX3 series.

not the best performance, but like you we're not using it for production stuff.

[Gewehr_43]

Just to follow up in case anyone else is looking for an answer: we connected the CX3 to our new 5.1 hosts without a problem.  Just the usual rigamarole of adding the targets on the vmware side, then registering the host in navisphere.  Worked flawlessly.

Thanks for the responses, guys.

[edinburgh1874]

It's a great SAN, even today....I managed to get mine perfoming a bit better by playing about with the cache settings.

Initally I was getting poor performance, but I changed the "cache watermark" from the default high/low of 80/60 to 60/40 as I was getting high amounts of cache "dirty pages". This reduced it from 99% to 40%.

Also changed the default amount of memory allocated cache to favour writes, I don't think read cache is as useful as write...I've currently got it set to 2500Mb/512Mb.

After these tweaks, it's performing much better!

[doihavetoaddane]

Edinburgh1874

I have a cx3-40c on 5.1 on iscsi only I think its delivering sub par transfer rate. Would you be willing to share your config info, or I would be happy to share mine, and even compensate for consulting time if desired jbloom@mail.com