E20-526 XtremIO Solutions and Design Specialist Exam for Technology Architects Questions and Answers

XtremIO inline data deduplication and inline data compression services are inline, all the time.

References:https://www.emc.com/collateral/faq/faq-million-dollar-guarantee-rp-2016.pdf

Proceed with filesystem aging by doing random overwrite cycles.

References:https://www.emc.com/techpubs/vipr/understanding_solutionpacks-3.htm

The XtremIO's RESTful API allows HTTPS-based interface for automation, orchestration, query and provisioning of the system. With the API, third party applications can be used to control and fully administer the array.

Normally you would access the API using some form of programming/scripting language, such as Python or Perl. However for the purposes of learning or testing concepts there are a number of tools that work better, such as HTTPRrequester and curl.

* Curl is a command-line tool that exists in all Linux distributions, and is available for most other Unix OSes as well as Windows.

To use curl to access XtremIO you’ll need to pass it a few options, such as the username/password to access the array (any valid account on the XtremIO XMS will work), the URL of the API, and potentially a few options such as -k to tell curl not to validate the SSL certificate (presuming you don’t have a valid certificate installed), and -s (silent) to stop curl displaying it’s progress as it downloads the response.

* HTTPRequester is a browser extension that is available for both Chrome and Firefox.

As with for curl, you’ll need to provide a username/password, which is done by clicking on the “Authentication…” box, which adds two boxes below the URL for the username and the password.

References:https://blog.docbert.org/using-the-xtremio-rest-api-part-1/

The queue depth is per‐LUN, and not per‐initiator. Here there are 64 LUNs, each visible through 4 paths, which would indicate that 256 is a good choice for the queue depth setting.

Note: As a general advice, for optimal operation with XtremIO storage, consider the following: Set the queue depth to 256.

References:https://www.emc.com/collateral/white-paper/h14583-wp-best-practice-sql-server-xtremio.pdf

In an environment where a host with two HBAs (VMware Best Practice) is connected to two fabrics and storage array with two Storage Controllers (EMC VNX, for example) the host will have four paths to a LUN: 2 Controllers x 2 HBAs = 4 paths

If you go to the extreme and configure your XtremIO with eight X-Brick, you have 16 controllers. Again, two HBAs per host and the max number of LUNs you can attach to an ESXi host will be 32… I understand, different OS’es may have different limits than VMware and this logic will not be applicable.

If you have hit the limit of 1024 paths per host (1024 / 4 controllers / 2 HBAs = 128 LUNs) and need to provision more LUNs, the best way will be to re-zone the host to limit the number of X-Bricks / Controllers the host HBA can connect to.

The following diagram displays the logical connection topology for 4 paths.