Regularly throughout the year, I like to take PIT (Point in Time) backups of my ESXi host configurations. These form part of my Critical Config backups that I hope I’ll never have to use. But like any backup, these are merely another safety net as we strive to have more Continue Reading
PowerShell
EMC Recoverpoint: Consistency Group/Transfer/Init and RPA stats via RP CLI & PowerShell
The Recoverpoint GUI has improved a lot over time, and the current incarnation in the “Unisphere” framework is the best yet, by a long way. Some operations are still a bit painful, and I’ve found myself this week cooking up some RP-CLI + Powershell goodness to get details in a Continue Reading
Windows Server 2012 R2 – Dedup-orama
It seems that just about everybody is doing deduplication these days, and rightly so. Storage is expensive and we all need to get more out of less. I’ve used various vendor dedup implementations over the years and generally had good success with them (EMC, Commvault, Dell, DataDomain) but since Microsoft Continue Reading
EMC VNX – Combine NAR files. The EASY way
Anyone who has worked at length with EMC Clariion or VNX would be familiar with the good old NAR files. These are the important little files where statistics about array performance are saved/archived, so you can them open them in Analyzer and review the massive amount of performance metrics and Continue Reading
VMware ESXi CBT Bug – Your data may be at risk
Changed Block Tracking (CBT) is a great feature introduced in ESXi 4.0, that effectively brought incremental backup technology to our virtual machines. Third parties were able to leverage this so backups would only require the processing of blocks that have changed rather than all blocks. This saved inordinate amounts of time, Continue Reading
How old is your Active Directory Forest ?
Curiosity got the better of me today and I decided I wanted to find out the exact date of when our Active Directory Forest was first installed. It would have to have been waaaay before my time at the company and would obviously have gone through many schema updates and Continue Reading