Pragmatic IO

Practical IT by Brett Sinclair

VAAI (vStorage API for Array Integration) was first introduced into vSphere in v4.1 with promises of deeper integration and control over supported storage Arrays.  Each feature (or Primitve) was designed to help us gain benefits from our Arrays. Vendors who didn’t support VAAI were frowned upon and those delivering on it heralded. These Primitives can be […]
It seems that just about everybody is doing deduplication these days, and rightly so. Storage is expensive and we all need to get more out of less. I’ve used various vendor dedup implementations over the years and generally had good success with them (EMC, Commvault, Dell, DataDomain) but since Microsoft announced dedup in the first […]
This weeks HEADS UP ! and this time for us VNX2 users, courtesy of EMC TA email Seeing  “Potential….Data Loss” in any ETA for equipment I admin raises my “Be Alert but not alarmed” counter. Full Release here This only affects upgrades to 05.33.000.5.074 which is the latest (Oct) Block OE and only if the “NDU […]
This weeks HEADS UP ! and this time for us VNX2 users, courtesy of EMC TA email Seeing  “Potential….Data Loss” in any ETA for equipment I admin raises my “Be Alert but not alarmed” counter. Full Release here This only affects upgrades to 05.33.000.5.074 which is the latest (Oct) Block OE and only if the “NDU […]
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 […]
[crayon-6a3ec867aa280326394621/] I noticed this little gem today whilst in the process of adjusting some SRM documentation and grabbing some screenshots;                 I hadn’t received any alerts so didn’t think it was a major issue, but sounded like it’s the sort of error that may be annoying during execution of a Recovery plan. In […]
My ever reliable EMC TAM emailed me recently to give me a heads up regarding a potential issue with one of our VNX arrays. This particular array was overdue for an upgrade anyway, but has special change control requirements. It affects VNX1 series arrays that have particular 300GB & 600GB 15K SAS drives with the […]
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2014/10/vsphere-6-0-rc-now-live.html It’s here…or is it. The above link went live and was then pulled, the explanation being that the vSPhere 6.0 RC is available, but ONLY for BETA program members. Regardless, the features and improvements listed are worthy of being posted;   •Quality: Improved overall quality of the product, increased vCenter performance and usability enhancements, […]
 ** Edit,  9th October — Many EMC products now have patches available **   VNX Series1          VNX Series2          XtremIO          VNXe –Get busy !   On the 24th September, a series of CVE (Common Vulnerabilities & Exposure) incidents were published and have gained significant […]