Heads up ! – EMC PowerPath/VE 5.9.1 & VMware ESXi 5.x potential disruption

It’s HEADS UP! time again, as usual courtesy of an EMC TA bulletin. ‘VMware ESXI hosts may become unresponsive after adding or removing LUNs when running PowerPath/VE 5.9.1’ This doesn’t sound like a particulalry fun way to start or end your day so read on if you want to avoid it; Continue Reading

EMC VNX/VNX2 – Naviseccli & Powershell – Bulk config changes with ease

GUI’s are generally cool, but when you need to get many of the same/similar tasks done, you can’t beat the speed and ease of using scripts and CLI based tools. I recently had a situation with a EMC VNX2 array where someone (or something) had caused all the LUNs in Continue Reading

“GHOST” Vulnerability on EMC products

No, not that type of ghost.   Just a quick post to collate some info regarding EMC equipment and a recently discovered vulnerability in certain libraries present in some versions of Linux, which are utilized in a number of EMC systems. As usual, this is a buffer-overflow type vulnerability, this time Continue Reading

VMware ESXi CBT bug PT3 — ESXi 5.5 now fixed.

This now becomes the 3rd post regarding the infamous Changed Block Tracking bug that was/is evident in all versions of ESXi 4+. If you missed them, Part 1  &  Part 2 Finally today we see the bug squashed in ESXi 5.5 with the release of Patch ESXi-5.5.0-20150104001-standard (2099271). This still leaves Continue Reading

ESXi – Driver VIB update using ESXCLI

Nothing groundbreaking here folks, but this is a quick and easy way to upgrade the drivers (in this case Network Intel & Broadcom) on your host(s) I’ve done this many times for various reasons: Misbehaving drivers after upgrades, Version control, “’cause I wanna’”. etc Login to your host with the Continue Reading

EMC VNX/VNX2/VMAX: 600GB 15k Drive Increased failure rates – with fix.

This is the second time I have had EMA technical advisories recently regarding issues with 15k SAS disks. The first one I wrote about here. It doesn’t sound quite as serious as the last one (OMG, DATA LOSS), but worthy of a look and fix. Details; and full link here and excerpt Continue Reading

VMware PowerCLI – Suppress vCenter Certificate warnings

A very quick post this one, but an annoying thing I often see left unchecked in environments, that is simple to fix in a minute. Yes, this is an old topic, but it’s still too evident today…. This should be in your “just do it” category. It’s the awful Certificate Continue Reading

EMC RecoverPoint 4.1 SP1 GA & RecoverPoint for VM’s now Free to use

    No sooner had I written this post, EMC release Service Pack 1 for RecoverPoint 4.1 with the fix included. This is an important release as finally environments that are on 4.x have a validated upgrade path to 4.1/SE that will pass the EMC mandated change control process, which has Continue Reading