The release of XtremIO V4 earlier this year delivered a lot of improvements to an already powerful package. One of the improvements I have been keen to explore was the ability to manage multiple clusters from a single XMS console. The benefits I see are obvious… A single management point for Continue Reading
EMC Elect
Heads Up ! – EMC VNX1 – Potential Data Unavailability during NDU
First time in a little while, but another EMC TA bulletin arrived in my inbox last week. The inclusion of “potential data unavailability” in the subject got my attention. Full release here This particular bulletin affects only VNX Series 1 Arrays (5300, 5500, 5700 and 7500) that are upgrading to Continue Reading
EMC VPLEX Metro: Cluster Witness Server Maintenance
Although it’s not mandatory, the Cluster Witness Server (CWS) in a VPLEX Metro Cluster serves a very important purpose as the arbitrator between inter-cluster network partition failures and actual cluster/site failures. It’s a lightweight (<3GB) VMware vm deployed from an OVA that establishes itself in a 3 way VPN between Continue Reading
EMC VPLEX – Quick tip: Recover lost admin password
We all have too many passwords to manage and despite our best intentions and practices, sometimes they get lost. This happened to me recently. When verifying some access before a code upgrade, I found the admin password I expected to work for VPLEX ( cli or Unisphere) did. not. work. Continue Reading
EMC RecoverPoint- Scripting bulk changes to Consistency Groups
It’s always nice to be able to make bulk changes to multiple devices. Most RecoverPoint environments will have a collection of Consistency Groups that could be as much as 128. To change a common configuration for all of them would take waaaay too long for my liking. A common option Continue Reading
EMC VNX/MCx Storage Pool Expansion – NavisecCLI or Unisphere
Storage Pool Expansion on EMC VNX/MCx arrays is a simple, straightforward task that can be done to increase capacity, performance or both. It is an online operation (NDU) but I always try to initiate it when load on an array is non-peak. The process is just like a Fast VP Continue Reading
EMC VNX/MCx Storage Pool Expansion – NavisecCLI or Unisphere
Storage Pool Expansion on EMC VNX/MCx arrays is a simple, straightforward task that can be done to increase capacity, performance or both. It is an online operation (NDU) but I always try to initiate it when load on an array is non-peak. The process is just like a Fast VP 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
EMC – VNX/2 -Accurately show Storage Pool RAID Drive Counts with Naviseccli
A frequent topic on various EMC forums is how to layout Storage Pools according to EMC best practice, typically regarding about what Drive count to use in the RAID config. The best practice documents* is the source of truth for this when creating pools, but what about when you expand Continue Reading
EMC MCx FAST Cache : Where’d my Dirty Pages go?
The VNX2/MCx Array release by EMC in 2013 highlighted the whole “multi-core everything” (MCx) software upgrade to make best use of the available CPU cores in the Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 Processors. This allowed for greater parallelism of tasks and big performance improvements across Data services and functions. I’m not Continue Reading