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 made to the DDB architecture,… Read more »
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 can be referenced and downloaded… Read more »
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; ESX Virtualization Vladan Seget VirtualizationIsLife Anthony… Read more »
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 VPLEX detach rule is defined… Read more »
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, workflows, provisioning…..and loads more. Download… Read more »
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 in fact correct ? If… Read more »
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 considerable time and open up… Read more »
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. This has been valuable to… Read more »
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 to disable the functionality altogether…. Read more »
I had a request from a colleague today whether we could monitor a file and alert him if it grows above a certain size. The context around this request involves an old, legacy process that calls an Access db file and automatically runs some statistics scripts which are then fed into a SQL database. Sounds awful I know, but the… Read more »