An important (but often neglected) part of any Recoverpoint deployment is to ensure you have regular backups of your cluster configuration. Important for DR, it also serves as a useful reference point for configuration forensics (What changed and when) There are multiple ways to do this, however my preference is to Continue Reading
EMC VNX: LUN migration & provisioning using NAVISECCLI
Being able to migrate LUNs between Storage Pools or Raid Groups is a useful feature that has been around for a long time. It’s non-disruptive so you can do it anytime, but be careful with the rate. It’s A bit like SVMotion for array side storage ! (even though it Continue Reading
Out now, vSphere 5.5U2
Hot off the Press ! vSPhere 5.5 Update 2 was made GA. Lots of issues resolved, and a bit of a ‘maintenance release’ imo. vCenter 5.5U2 Release Notes. ESXi 5.5U2 Release Notes. Notable inclusions; Edit Hardware V10 guest settings from the C# Client – Hooray ! And the community breathed Continue Reading
EMC VNX 0x704a: DAE is faulted. Servers may have lost access to disk drives in this enclosure.
Title sounds a bit nasty eh ?! I was confronted with this earlier this week, which was only noticed after logging into Unisphere to do some provisioning tasks. At this point, I had received no alerts (array side) nor any host issues. More alarmingly, no notifications. Oops. A quick Continue Reading
Heads up !! – EMC VNX/VNXe users, keep your Array software up to date
You’ve paid for your maintenance right ? Take advantage of it and keep up to date with your platform versions. Open an SR and schedule EMC to do an upgrade via RCM. They have a whole team who do array upgrades all day everyday. Keep them busy. Why ? Keep Continue Reading
VMware EVO:RAIL : SDDC in a box
Rumours of the VMware hyper-converged appliance have been riding high for some months under the guise of “Project Marvin”, now official, the details are out about EVO:RAIL VMware EVO:RAlL landing page is here. From the release; VMware EVO: RAIL™ combines compute, networking, and storage resources into a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance Continue Reading
vSphere – “Another task is already in progress..” fix with esxcli
I recently had the ‘pleasure’ of an unresponsive vm that had basically turned into a ZOMBIE ! It could not be restarted, edited, snapshot’d and was of course, unresponsive from an OS perspective (No RDP, ping or comms just totally off the air) Any attempted operation from the vSphere client returned Continue Reading
PowerCLI for basic vCenter/ESXi config management
Many admins use Host Profiles, vCM, vCOPS and the like to ensure element compliance within their VI inventory. While these can be fine solutions, many companies do not have the luxury of owning these products. In many cases the targeted use of powerCLI commands across your environment can help to Continue Reading
EMC VNX hotspare activation & rebuild monitoring with naviseccli
If you’ve ever wondered if you can monitor hotspare disk activities from naviseccli, the answer is yes…. ! As expected you receive your automated email alerts when a system fault occurs, in this case a disk failure (and hopefully a dial-home event was triggered via ESRS)about a disk failure; Using Continue Reading
vSphere Web client – tweaks & hotkeys
I’m not particularly enamoured with the vSphere web client, but one thing it has encouraged me to do is get more proficient using scripting/shell utilities like PowerCLI. When it was first released, it showed promise. But I, like many others was unimpressed by the lag and general slowness in navigation and Continue Reading