CommVault – Upgrade DDB to Transactional Mode

The deduplication databases (DDB) are arguably the most important component in an efficient and fast CommVault environment. If you’ve ever had a Media Agent fail unexpectedly before the DDB’s were able to gracefully shutdown, you’d be well aware the the restore and rebuild times can be very long. In Version Continue Reading

CommVault v10 SP14 – Issue with Synthetic Full Backups

I recently upgraded my CommCell from v10 SP13 to SP14. As usual, the upgrade was easy. Centrally deployed, no issues. The next set of scheduled fulls kicked off a few days later, and soon after there appeared to be an issue with Synthetic Full backups. In the Job Controller they 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

EMC VNX – Auto Array Configuration Backups using NavisecCLI and Powershell

Following on from yesterday’s EOY backup topic for ESXi, today I’ll document how to automate the backup of your  VNX & VNX2 Array configurations. As usual, I want this to be automated, set-and-forget and reliable. A combination of NavisecCLI and Powershell works beautifully for this. Without any doubt, the best documentation Continue Reading

Auto ESXi Host Configuration Backups with PowerCLI

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

VMware ESXi CBT bug — FIXED, sort of.

I’ve previously posted in detail about the VMware ESXi CBT bug here It’s taken a while but VMware have today released patches to address this issue for older versions of ESXI 5.0 & 5.1 Disappointingly, still no fix for ESXI 4.0 and more importantly ESXi 5.5 (Rumoured to be coming Continue Reading