Recently I was involved in helping out one of our larger customers with their VVol testing on VMAX3/VMAX All Flash. They had run into some challenges which fortunately we were able to resolve; however while working on the setup the 3rd party integrator asked me if there was any documentation which laid out the steps to both create AND destroy a VVol environment. See the issue for them is that they work with many companies who want to try out VVols and the integrator uses their own arrays along with the customer hosts. So for each new company they must start with a clean environment. I gave it some thought and concluded that even customers who owned their own equipment might like the ability to test VVols and then remove the VVol objects. After all, VVols allocate storage from the Storage Resource Pool (SRP) and will tie up that storage so it cannot be used by other devices.
Now I already have a fairly extensive whitepaper on installing and configuring VVols, but have few mentions in that document about removing objects. That is not to say it is all that complicated to tear things down, but as with many things the order of operations makes a difference. So I took advantage of my 3rd party integrator’s request, and created a document for him. Having gone through it a few times, I’m relatively comfortable sharing it here with my readers. The purpose of the document is to provide the steps, yet keep it all high-level. I rely on the whitepaper to fill in the details because putting information in multiple documents will invariably lead to discrepancies between them over time. I wish to avoid that. I’m posting the document directly here on my blog as it doesn’t rise to what I would consider to be a DELL EMC official whitepaper. I will keep it updated as necessary and even add to it if there are requests to do so.
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