Dell EMC Unity AFA-OE version 4.5x Upgrade

Gone are the days of 6 hour, nerve racking updates for Storage Arrays. They used to be a logistical nightmare. Change Control, careful planning. What if it goes pear shaped ? These are things that used to keep us up at night. Driven by a requirement of quick and frequent updates, 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 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

Dell EMC Unity – Bulk create Filesystems & NFS/SMB Shares

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 Continue Reading

Dell EMC Unity – Bulk create Filesystems & NFS/SMB Shares

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 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

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 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