Dell EMC Unity – Fix for “Domain Controller servers configured for the SMB server are not reachable”. Check Network Connectivity

My workplace has a number of All Flash Unity Arrays in Production, typically used as the “swiss army knife” for storage needs. They have proven to be very solid, well performing units as both block and nas hosts, but there has been a peculiar occurrence of alerts displayed periodically, regarding Continue Reading

CommVault – Upgrade DDB to Transactional Mode

The deduplication databases (DDB) are arguably the most important component in an efficient and fast CommVault environment. If you’ve ever had a Media Agent fail unexpectedly before the DDB’s were able to gracefully shutdown, you’d be well aware the the restore and rebuild times can be very long. In Version 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

Heads Up ! – EMC VNX2 – Potential Data Unavailability

I’m back from the wilderness ! Whenever I see an EMC ETA with the words “Potential Data Unavailability”, I give it immediate attention. Data. Is. Everything. This hot off the press item is titled “ETA 489936: VNX2: A firmware issue may cause certain solid state drives to become faulted, which Continue Reading

CommVault – The need for speed, pt 1

Speed and performance is an important capability of a Data Protection solution. Most people logically attribute this to being able to finish all tasks in a defined “window“. I’ve used CommVault for a long time and it’s one of my all time fav’s. It truly does “what it says on Continue Reading

EMC-VNX 1/2 and ESXi: Potential Data Unavailability

Another ETA hit my inbox over the weekend, this time relating to VNX/VNX2 and ESXi where a condition that could result in data being unavailable exists. If you are running a VNX and have a code base  of 05.32.000.5.219 or earlier or a VNX2 with codebase lower than 05.33.006.5.102 and earlier Continue Reading