Dell EMC Unity and VMware VVols – What’s all the fuss? Pt1

There’s been lots of talk about the wonders of VVols for a long time. They seemed to be a large amount of hope that they would be the panacea of all our Storage and Virtualization woes and be the vision going forward, at least for our  VMware environments. The hype Continue Reading

Dell EMC CloudIQ – VMware integration

     Part Deux ! Following on from my recent look at the CloudIQ mobile version, let’s take a look at a brand new functionality addition to this application. The same integrations, insights and monitoring are now available for you VMware environment, right in the Cloud IQ console. This allows Continue Reading

Dell EMC CloudIQ – Mobile version

CloudIQ, the free, cloud based monitoring and management application provided by Dell EMC is a very useful tool.  You can get the low-down onit https://blog.dellemc.com/en-us/cloudiq-a-web-based-fitness-tracker-for-your-storage/ Jon @ Fast Storage also give some excellent details here: https://faststorage.eu/cloudiq-is-looking-out-for-your-storage-systems-health/ Recently the notification/updates showed , a mobile version was released, and it’s very useful. Once installed, Continue Reading

Dell EMC Unity – Fix for “Domain Controller servers configured for the SMB server are not reachable”. Check Network Connectivity

My workplace has a number of All Flash Unity Arrays in Production, typically used as the “swiss army knife” for storage needs. They have proven to be very solid, well performing units as both block and nas hosts, but there has been a peculiar occurrence of alerts displayed periodically, regarding Continue Reading

CommVault 11 and VMware – ‘Virtualize Me’ Restores

Virtualize Me is a really useful feature that I’ve not had the requirement to use until recently. For any number of reasons, most companies still have actual Physical Hosts running normal workloads. They may not have been virtualized for a similar number of reasons. That’s life. I found myself with Continue Reading

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 Continue Reading

EMC VPLEX, RecoverPoint Warning: Failed to retrieve VPLEX management view

Quick post with a quick VPLEX/RecoverPoint fix. (CL & EX) During some regular checking, I noticed that a warning had crept into the VPLEX Management console;     Quick cluster check showed there were no apparent errors; Checking RecoverPoint also showed a warning; There was no issues found, data was Continue Reading

Heads Up ! – EMC VNX2 – Potential Data Unavailability

I’m back from the wilderness ! Whenever I see an EMC ETA with the words “Potential Data Unavailability”, I give it immediate attention. Data. Is. Everything. This hot off the press item is titled “ETA 489936: VNX2: A firmware issue may cause certain solid state drives to become faulted, which Continue Reading

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. Continue Reading

EMC – Self Help Pt2 : SolVe Desktop

** Updated August 2016** Some good news received today from Kirsty Allen from the SolVe desktop team @ EMC. SolVe Desktop has now been updated to include some new products; RecoverPoint VNX (1 & 2) VxRail Unity VMAX All Flash To get them included in your own catalog should just require Continue Reading