I’ve been quite impressed by the new UI for the new Unity arrays. The pains of JAVA/Flash annoyances are a thing of the past with the new sleek, smooth interface on board. There are still some things missing however. One of the tasks I had before me was to create a significant amount of filesystems […]
Tag: PowerShell
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 11, there have been improvements […]
AWS and PowerShell – Let’s be friends Part 1
I first used AWS approximately 4 years ago. At that time, programmatic management of services was not an easy hurdle to jump and required regular ‘feeding & watering’. Naturally, these tools have matured greatly so whatever tool-set you are most comfortable with has a well developed set of features/options available for you to use. These […]
ESXi 5.5 – Automating VMFS UNMAP w/ PowerCLI and PowerShell
With vSphere 6.5 recently released, a nice feature was the automated execution of the UNMAP command against thin provisioned datastores to reclaim space. This requires no user interaction, it’s fully automated for you and can free up significant amounts of space from your datastores. There’s some good information regarding the v6.5 release on these blogs; […]
VMware DRS rule manipulation using PowerCLI (EMC VPLEX use case) Part 1.
VPLEX is another of my favourite products, and for good reason. I currently run a Metro cluster underneath a VMware platform that has proven to be super reliable. One important design consideration for this is to ensure that VM’s are configured for site bias. Why ? Glad you asked. In a VPLEX Metro configuration, a […]
EMC XtremIO PowerShell support – Finally!
EMC have released XIOS version 4.1.10-33 and XMS version 4.2 recently, and although they look like minor point releases, there are some long awaited improvements that I certainly have been pleased with. The first one is a PowerShell support. Readers of this blog will now I’m a big PowerShell guy. I use it for automation, […]
EMC RecoverPoint : Automated Protection Window Summary
One thing that is often overlooked after a RecoverPoint solution is implemented is the ongoing Protection Window value for your Consistency Groups. During the design phase, the Journal sizes are (hopefully) diligently and accurately calculated according to your RPO. But as time goes by, how many people actually check that the projected Protection Windows are […]
VMware PowerCLI – What are you waiting for ?
I still talk to people who are reluctant to jump in and learn some basic scripting techniques. Usually their response is that it’s easy in the gui or “scripting is hard” or the “I’m not a developer so why bother ?”. Meh, make it happen. The facts is, learning some basic scripting techniques will save you […]
ESXi – An oldie but a goodie – CDP info via PowerCLI and Host CLI
When you don’t use something for a while, you tend to forget how valuable it can be. Even from its very early iterations, ESXi has been able to display CDP information so you can quickly establish “what’s patched where “. Easy to get from the gui, but far more useful from the shell or cli. […]
Windows Server 2012 R2- Quick tip: Disable Server Manager Loading on Startup
I try to avoid logging onto server consoles these days, preferring to do things remotely, via cli, ssh remote PowerShell etc. Somethimes though, you just have to. When I do , I really don’t like waiting for the Server Manager app to load. Rather than wait and close it off each time, I investigated a way […]