Host Agent Fail Error ID:26263 Adding new storage

In a LAB environment its not that easy to get access to enterprise storage and as such it sometimes takes a bit of trial and error to get the SMI-S provider working as we cant practice it in a LAB.  I was recently working with a EMC VNX 5300 SAN and so here is what I did to get the provider working.  (I will add that I got a bit of help from EMC support but I would not have got it going with the information on TechNet)

No matter what I did I kept getting the following error when importing my storage.  There was almost no information on the web except other people with the same error.

 

 Lets firstly understand what is the point of this SMI-S provider.

Lets start off with the SMI-S provider and what it does.  With a large disparate amount of storage manufactures all with different ways to communicate with there storage devices it difficult for other vendors to make products that can manage or monitor storage devices through one interface.  The SMI-S therefor is an independent group that produce a vendor neutral solution for managing storage providers.  So how do they communicate?  Well when you install the SMS-S provider it essentially creates a HTTP server that can parse XML so that for example when an administrator in the VMM console requests a LUN for new storage for a cloud then that request will be sent to the provider and in turn it will translate that request into the creation of a new storage LUN on the SAN.  If you try and consider the impact of that we can easily have a configuration whereby the VMM admin can control Storage, Hypervisor and Network components in one place.  That’s a really powerfully admin position in terms of reducing the admin overhead .  Have a look at what Microsoft wrote about it on TechNet.   http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/06/25/introduction-to-smi-s.aspx

Before we get into the storage add here is a diagram to explain in overview what you are supposed to be doing. 

  

Firstly you will need to get the SMI-S provider from EMC

The one I used was se7507-Windows-x64-SMI

 Then follow through with the install as shown below, but be sure and install the provider on something like one of your Hyper-V clusters and not on the VMM server.  You can install it multiple times as its just essentially brokering a connection to your SAN and your SAN doesn't care it there is another one installed.

  

Once you have the install done there are two command sets we need to run and they are all in %Program Files\EMC, then they two areas you will need to go to are

For Authorization

%Program Files\EMC\SYMCLI\bin

And to check the deployment

%Program Files\EMC\ECIM\ECOM\bin

I am assuming that you are running this on Server 2012 and so you are going to need to open any CMD secessions from an elevated command prompt. 10.201.0.83

Enter the command that I have here replacing the host IP address with your own.

 

If you get the command wrong it will just prompt you to let you know that you have entered the command incorrectly as show below

   

Then navigate to the  %programfiles%\emc\ecim\ecom\bin  and  enter the Disco command.  Now its important here to understand that there is a bit of a design fault with the way EMC has designed this as the only account that works for setting up the connection is the account that has full admin access to the storage device.  Lets hope in the near future this is changed.

Now we are going to change to the second folder set and verify the SMI-S connection.  In the CMD screen below if I have not entered a value then I just accepted the defaults.

 The last thing that needs to be done now is enter "Disco" to discover your storage provider.  As you can see from the value below 0 means you are connecting OK.

Now that we have the SMI-S provider talking to the SAN we can go to VMM and add in the storage array.

Now lets go to VMM and get this storage in.

At a high level here is what is needed

1. Create a RunAs account
2. Add the storage provider (its supper important to understand that it’s the host where you have installed the provider on and not you VMM server)
3. Once the storage is added you can create LUN's
4. The new LUN'S needed to be added to your clustered in VMM

To begin the process we need a RunAs account.  I used my generic admin account as per the steps above.  As this is not a domain account you do not want to validate the domain creds. 

  I added the storage by its network name, and to do this I had to add that name to DNS, the protocol is SMI-S CIMXML and the port number is what was specified in your provider test in the previous section, this is usually 5988

  

 The storage array gets discovered and you can verify that the provider is working OK.

I get a conformation of the storage addition and the provider address. 

Now when I go to create the LUN I can do so from within VMM.  In this case I am using thin provisioning on the LUN as there is now need to commit all the disk right from the start.

You can now go to the fabric in VMM and add the storage

You can now see that there are 3 LUNs being made available to the cluster.

 Following these steps I was able to add the storage and manage the LUN through VMM.  When I saw this all working the way its supposed I was really impressed with the working reality of this product.

Just one last note,  there is a way to test the SMI-S provider and its a source forge download that you can get here.

PK