EMC Symmetrix VMAX physical layout

A visualization tool from EMC is called the Symmetrix System viewer and is available on their support site. Here is screenshot showing a 4 engine, 4 drive bay VMAX 40k configuration:

Symmetrix System Viewer

The system bay is where the front end connectivity to the SAN fabric will be made by customers, it is the middle cabinet in the picture above. Fibre connections will be made to the Symmetrix front-end modules(FAs) on the engine as required. Below is a picture of the engine with FC front-end ports and their labels of E0 to H1 per director. For the purposes of redundancy and best practices, it is best to not make FA connections to the same director per host.

So for example to make an FA fibre connection to 7H0 in the Symmetrix system bay you would find Engine 4 and on the odd director (7) it would port H0 on the right side.

For engine to director mappings and install order of the engine refer to the list of the System bay below:

VMAX Directors in Engine Layout and Order of installation

 Directors 15 & 16 in Engine 8 - 8th 
 Directors 13 & 14 in Engine 7 - 6th 
 Directors 11 & 12 in Engine 6 - 4th 
 Directors  9 & 10 in Engine 5 - 2nd 
 _______________________________
Directors  7 & 8 in Engine 4 - 1st  
 Directors  5 & 6 in Engine 3 - 3rd  
 Directors  3 & 4 in Engine 2 - 5th  
  Directors  1 & 2 in Engine 1 - 7th   

Finally below is a system layout with 8 Engines, 4 directly connected and 6 daisy chained storage bays. Generally storage bays and disk are installed by EMC support.

EMC VMAX 8-Engine system