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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 functionality baked into the EAC. […]
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 hosts in a dev cluster, […]
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 Over time, data is aged, clients are reconfigured/deleted and this can all add up to indexes getting out of date, oversized tables etc.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 […]
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 a RAID Group to become […]
A very quick post this one, but an annoying thing I often see left unchecked in environments, that is simple to fix in a minute. Yes, this is an old topic, but it’s still too evident today…. This should be in your “just do it” category. It’s the awful Certificate warning displayed in your Powershell […]
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 […]