The reward for effort when scripting is almost always worth it. Today I had the task of removing a particular AntiVirus product from a 36 host VDI cluster. Part of this requires the removal of NSX-Manager and all the groovy components it uses to do it’s thing, including a vSwitch Continue Reading
Powershell
Dell EMC Unity – Bulk enable Advanced Dedup after upgrade
One of the shortcomings in an otherwise really good UI in the Unity platform is the inability to make bulk changes to many objects. While making the changes are easy, applying it to many or even hundreds of objects is impractical and time consuming. Boring. Recently after an upgrade to Continue Reading
Dell EMC Unity – Bulk create Filesystems & NFS/SMB Shares
I’ve been quite impressed by the new UI for the new Unity arrays. The pains of JAVA/Flash annoyances are a thing of the past with the new sleek, smooth interface on board. There are still some things missing however. One of the tasks I had before me was to create Continue Reading
Dell EMC Unity – Bulk create Filesystems & NFS/SMB Shares
I’ve been quite impressed by the new UI for the new Unity arrays. The pains of JAVA/Flash annoyances are a thing of the past with the new sleek, smooth interface on board. There are still some things missing however. One of the tasks I had before me was to create Continue Reading
CommVault and VMware – VSA Backup Filtering options
There’s always been a number of ways to apply filters to VM’s and disks. It could be done at the Backup-Set or Sub-client level. This is a little bit clunky and can lead to unnecessary VM’s being backed up. If you’re using a Capacity based licence, this is 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
AWS and PowerShell – Let’s be friends Part 1
I first used AWS approximately 4 years ago. At that time, programmatic management of services was not an easy hurdle to jump and required regular ‘feeding & watering’. Naturally, these tools have matured greatly so whatever tool-set you are most comfortable with has a well developed set of features/options available 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
EMC XtremIO PowerShell support – Finally!
EMC have released XIOS version 4.1.10-33 and XMS version 4.2 recently, and although they look like minor point releases, there are some long awaited improvements that I certainly have been pleased with. The first one is a PowerShell support. Readers of this blog will now I’m a big PowerShell guy. Continue Reading