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VMax3/PowerMax Deallocation Steps

Steps to perform Full and Partial reclamation of SAN devices provisioned from Dell EMC VMax3/PowerMax to a standalone Server.

We will be using the above setup to go through the various steps. There are 2 devices( Gold SLO ) assigned to Server1 from a PowerMax/Vmax3 storage Array through Autoprovisioning Groups. These devices configured as part of a filesystem and making use of by some Application or Database running in the server.

1. Full Reclaim

Remove all the SAN Storage allocated to the Server. This possibly include below activities.

At Server Side:

1. Stop all the Applications/Databases.
2. Unmount/Delete the filesystems
3. Remove all the SAN devices from the Operating System.
4. Remove physical cable connectivity from the Server HBAs to the SAN switches.
5. Power off the server.

At Switch Side:

1. Confirm the HBA ports are no longer connected to the switches( verification of step.4 on server side.).
2. Delete and remove the related Zones from the Active Zoneset.( Refer : Removal of existing Zone from active Zoneset for Cisco MDS Switches.

Once the above steps are done, we can start the reclamation process from the storage end.

2. Partial Reclaim

This type of reclaim request demands the removal of only selected SAN devices provisioned to the Server( Removing device 'AAAAA' for example). The server will still have visibility to the remaining devices, all the physical cabling and zoning will be intact.

At Server Side:

1. Remove the SAN device from the Operating System.

Once we have the confirmation from the server end that the device(s) have been removed from OS, following tasks can be performed at the Storage side.