The DELL PowerVault MD series Storage Arrays are solid and reliable units. Whilst I don’t use any for what may be considered “Primary” Storage, I use them for many workloads. Backup targets, Image Respositories, Archives, Unstructured data etc. In a 5 RU form factor, it’s a dense package with over 120TB of usable capacity. […]
Speed and performance is an important capability of a Data Protection solution. Most people logically attribute this to being able to finish all tasks in a defined “window“. I’ve used CommVault for a long time and it’s one of my all time fav’s. It truly does “what it says on the box”. I’ve also been […]
RecoverPoint is one of my favourite products. It’s unique, reliable and has helped me out of trouble on more than one occasion. Whilst most VM admins associate it with SRM and thus Site/LUN/Datastore recovery, it can also fill in an often overlooked gap in data protection. Pre and Post backup coverage. The ability to recover […]
It’s always nice to be able to make bulk changes to multiple devices. Most RecoverPoint environments will have a collection of Consistency Groups that could be as much as 128. To change a common configuration for all of them would take waaaay too long for my liking. A common option to change is the “Managed […]
Running the dbmaintenance utility regularly is a great way to get the Commcell database in ‘primo shape. Over time, data is aged, clients are reconfigured/deleted and this can all add up to indexes getting out of date, oversized tables etc. It’s recommended to do a Full DBMAINTENANCE operation every 6 months, as per CommVault latest […]
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 4.x susceptible though so I […]
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 been many months in the […]
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 or config backup tool is […]
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 resilient systems. With the calendar […]
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 Jan 2015) ESXi 5.0 Patch […]