EMC Recoverpoint: Automating Cluster Configuration backups

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 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

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