Exchange 2013 Message Tracking – The easy way, with a PowerShell Form

Message Tracking in Exchange 2013 changed significantly. In previous versions there was a simple gui driven process to do quick, basic “track & trace” message reporting. In Exchange 2013, there’s multiple ways to do this common task. Firstly using the Get-MessageTracking PowerShell commandlet, and also by using the Delivery Reports Continue Reading

EMC – VNX/2 -Accurately show Storage Pool RAID Drive Counts with Naviseccli

A frequent topic on various EMC forums is how to layout Storage Pools according to EMC best practice, typically regarding about what Drive count to use in the RAID config. The best practice documents* is the source of truth for this when creating pools, but what about when you expand Continue Reading

vSphere/ESXi: When good tasks go bad – Fix with ESXCLI via PowerCLI

Most of the time, tasks we start in vSphere just work. That’s why we love it. Queue ’em up, and move onto something else. Sometimes though, they go bad. They freeze, stick, die or just plain error out. This happened to me last week. After changing the scratch location for Continue Reading

Commvault Simpana – Automating DBMaintenance utility execution with qlogin and Powershell

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 Over time, data is aged, clients are reconfigured/deleted and this can all add up to indexes getting out of date, oversized tables etc.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 Continue Reading

ESXi/vSphere 5.5 U2: old NFS/vMotion issue reincarnated “remote host IP_Address failed with status Busy”

Uh oh, an old issue seems to have been reincarnated in vSphere 5.5 U2 which may cause vMotions of guests on NFS storage to fail with the error: remote host IP_Address failed with status Busy This issue was first evident some time ago where it affected V4.1 and was subsequently fixed Continue Reading

EMC VNX/VNX2 – Naviseccli & Powershell – Bulk config changes with ease

GUI’s are generally cool, but when you need to get many of the same/similar tasks done, you can’t beat the speed and ease of using scripts and CLI based tools. I recently had a situation with a EMC VNX2 array where someone (or something) had caused all the LUNs in Continue Reading

EMC VNX – Auto Array Configuration Backups using NavisecCLI and Powershell

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 Continue Reading

VMware ESXi CBT Bug – Your data may be at risk

Changed Block Tracking (CBT) is a great feature introduced in ESXi 4.0, that effectively brought incremental backup technology to our virtual machines. Third parties were able to leverage this so backups would only require the processing of blocks that have changed rather than all blocks. This saved inordinate amounts of time, Continue Reading