Although it’s not mandatory, the Cluster Witness Server (CWS) in a VPLEX Metro Cluster serves a very important purpose as the arbitrator between inter-cluster network partition failures and actual cluster/site failures. It’s a lightweight (<3GB) VMware vm deployed from an OVA that establishes itself in a 3 way VPN between Continue Reading
EMC VPLEX – Quick tip: Recover lost admin password
We all have too many passwords to manage and despite our best intentions and practices, sometimes they get lost. This happened to me recently. When verifying some access before a code upgrade, I found the admin password I expected to work for VPLEX ( cli or Unisphere) did. not. work. Continue Reading
EMC debuts the VNXe1600
I rarely post articles with a marketing slant, but have allowed myself an exception here to ease back into writing after a short hiatus, and this looks like a product I could find some good use cases for 🙂 EMC have recently released a new member to the VNX/e family, Continue Reading
EMC RecoverPoint- Standalone VM Recovery
RecoverPoint is one of my favourite products. It’s unique, reliable and has helped me out of trouble on more than one occasion. Whilst most VM admins associate it with SRM and thus Site/LUN/Datastore recovery, it can also fill in an often overlooked gap in data protection. Pre and Post backup Continue Reading
EMC RecoverPoint- Scripting bulk changes to Consistency Groups
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 Continue Reading
Windows Server 2012 R2- Quick tip: Disable Server Manager Loading on Startup
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 Continue Reading
Synology DSM 5.2 – Replacing a failed disk in SSD Cache
Not long ago I installed some SSD cache in a Synology DS1815+. It was a cinch. To my surprise, less than 1 week into it’s life, one of the mirrored Samsung 850 Pro drives failed. Fortunately this unit was not in production, but it would not have mattered as the cache Continue Reading
Synology DSM 5.2 on 1815+ Enabling R/W SSD Cache
I’ve been deploying a few Synology units lately. They’re well featured, easy to use, reliable and very well priced. For small scale spot SMB storage, they certainly are hard to beat. Up until now, I hadn’t had the need or requirement for any significant performance profiles, with just the SHR Continue Reading
Quick Tip: Powershell snippet to alert on filesize growth
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 Continue Reading
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