Nothing like a bit of Hyperbole, but some days are better than others! One thing I have learned over the years is to always expect the unexpected. Yesterday’s ‘unexpected‘ was one of these; That’s cool, HA kicked in and the stranded guests began to restart as expected. Not great, […]
Anyone who has worked at length with EMC Clariion or VNX would be familiar with the good old NAR files. These are the important little files where statistics about array performance are saved/archived, so you can them open them in Analyzer and review the massive amount of performance metrics and data stats from your array. […]
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, data and effort while allowing […]
An important (but often neglected) part of any Recoverpoint deployment is to ensure you have regular backups of your cluster configuration. Important for DR, it also serves as a useful reference point for configuration forensics (What changed and when) There are multiple ways to do this, however my preference is to utilize an existing scripting host […]
Being able to migrate LUNs between Storage Pools or Raid Groups is a useful feature that has been around for a long time. It’s non-disruptive so you can do it anytime, but be careful with the rate. It’s A bit like SVMotion for array side storage ! (even though it predates VMWare of course). It’s […]
I recently had the ‘pleasure’ of an unresponsive vm that had basically turned into a ZOMBIE ! It could not be restarted, edited, snapshot’d and was of course, unresponsive from an OS perspective (No RDP, ping or comms just totally off the air) Any attempted operation from the vSphere client returned “Another task is already in […]
Many admins use Host Profiles, vCM, vCOPS and the like to ensure element compliance within their VI inventory. While these can be fine solutions, many companies do not have the luxury of owning these products. In many cases the targeted use of powerCLI commands across your environment can help to keep things in ‘check’ and […]
If you’ve ever wondered if you can monitor hotspare disk activities from naviseccli, the answer is yes…. ! As expected you receive your automated email alerts when a system fault occurs, in this case a disk failure (and hopefully a dial-home event was triggered via ESRS)about a disk failure; Using Naviseccli, you can get a […]
Whilst most of the time I like Unisphere, sometimes it’s nice to be able to get info about your Array quickly and without having to fight with Java. Naviseccli is great for just that purpose. It’s fast, efficient and you get info you need quickly. Most of these commands will be relevant to series 1 […]
Snapshots are cool. We all use them, we all love them. But they can be tedious to manage, and this can lead to them causing issues. Take some care to manage them proactively so they don’t become a monkey on your back. I’ve grown rather fond of managing snapshot functions using PowerCLI. Why? It’s fast, […]