Gone are the days of 6 hour, nerve racking updates for Storage Arrays. They used to be a logistical nightmare. Change Control, careful planning. What if it goes pear shaped ? These are things that used to keep us up at night. Driven by a requirement of quick and frequent updates, Continue Reading
Fundamentals
CommVault – Software Updates via HTTP/HTTPS
This is an early release feature that was slipped in without much fanfare. If you installed your CommCell using or after Version 11 SP5, you’ll be quietly downloading CommVault updates over HTTPS. For many of us though, our CommCells have evolved over various upgrades and downloads would be using FTP. Continue Reading
ESXi 5.5 – Automating VMFS UNMAP w/ PowerCLI and PowerShell
With vSphere 6.5 recently released, a nice feature was the automated execution of the UNMAP command against thin provisioned datastores to reclaim space. This requires no user interaction, it’s fully automated for you and can free up significant amounts of space from your datastores. There’s some good information regarding the Continue Reading
VMware DRS rule manipulation using PowerCLI (EMC VPLEX use case) Part 1.
VPLEX is another of my favourite products, and for good reason. I currently run a Metro cluster underneath a VMware platform that has proven to be super reliable. One important design consideration for this is to ensure that VM’s are configured for site bias. Why ? Glad you asked. In Continue Reading
VMware ESXi – Get VM’s by VLAN ID with PowerCLI
Often when when working in large environments you’ll get interesting requests. These may be to assist in troubleshooting, auditing, reporting or any other reason. I was recently requested to provide a list of mac addresses for every VM with a vNIC in a specific vlan. I had a feeling this was going Continue Reading
VMware PowerCLI – What are you waiting for ?
I still talk to people who are reluctant to jump in and learn some basic scripting techniques. Usually their response is that it’s easy in the gui or “scripting is hard” or the “I’m not a developer so why bother ?”. Meh, make it happen. The facts is, learning some basic Continue Reading
VMware PowerCLI – What are you waiting for ?
I still talk to people who are reluctant to jump in and learn some basic scripting techniques. Usually their response is that it’s easy in the gui or “scripting is hard” or the “I’m not a developer so why bother ?”. Meh, make it happen. The facts is, learning some basic Continue Reading
ESXi – An oldie but a goodie – CDP info via PowerCLI and Host CLI
When you don’t use something for a while, you tend to forget how valuable it can be. Even from its very early iterations, ESXi has been able to display CDP information so you can quickly establish “what’s patched where “. Easy to get from the gui, but far more useful Continue Reading
Quick tip – EMC: Certificate issues after NavisecCLI upgrade
Quick tip….. I recently upgraded naviseccli to version 7.33.6.0.96 This is a really quick update so on my dual screen setup, I kicked off the installer in the left monitor while I worked on other tasks on the right. Cool, it’s just Next, next, next right ? Finished in a few Continue Reading
vSphere/ESXi: When good tasks go bad – Fix with ESXCLI via PowerCLI
Most of the time, tasks we start in vSphere just work. That’s why we love it. Queue ’em up, and move onto something else. Sometimes though, they go bad. They freeze, stick, die or just plain error out. This happened to me last week. After changing the scratch location for Continue Reading