Submit! (to the System Storage Interoperation Center)

When using the IBM System Storage Interoperation Center (SSIC) you need to submit!

I have recently come across two situations where technology combinations appeared to be supported, but there were significant caveats that were not mentioned until the ‘submit’ button was clicked.

The following example finds both of the caveats I have come across this week.

Choose FCoE (or FCoCEE as some refer to it) and VMware 5.1 and IBM Flex Systems, and then Cisco Nexus 5596UP. To simplify the number of options, also choose Midrange Disk and Storwize V7000 Host Attachment categories, and x440 Compute Node.

All good I was thinking – unsupported combinations are not selectable, so the fact that I could select these meant I was safe I thought…

What most people seem to neglect to do is hit the submit button. Submit can sometimes bring up a lot more detail including caveats…

Those with excellent vision might have noted this obscure comment associated with VMware 5.1…

A system call “fsync” may return error or timeout on VMWare guest OS’s and /or Vios LPAR OS’s

A self-funded chocolate fish will be awarded to the first person who can tell me what that actually means (yes I know what fsync is, but what does this caveat actually mean operationally?)

And possibly more important are the two identical comments made on the SAN/switch/networking lines

“Nexus TOR ( Top of Rack) Switch: Must be connected to Supported Cisco MDS Switches.”

i.e. Nexus is only supported with FCoE from the Flex server, if the V7000 itself is attached to a Cisco MDS at the back-end, even though I did not include MDS in the list of technologies I selected on the first page.

So the moral of the story is that you must hit the submit button on the SSIC if you want to get the full support picture.

And as a reminder that compatibility issues usually resolve themselves with time, here is a Dilbert cartoon from twenty one years ago. June 1992.