EMC- March Product Update roundup: VNX, VNX2, NaviSECCLI, RecoverPoint, USM

It’s been a busy month for software updates @ EMC. If you subscribe to the various product bulletins, you’d have seen this info, otherwise, READ on ! VNX1 https://support.emc.com/products/12781_VNX1-Series Updated Navisphere CLI (naviseccli), Unisphere Service Manager (USM), Unisphere Host Agent VNX2 https://support.emc.com/products/36656_VNX2-Series Updated Navisphere CLI (naviseccli), Unisphere Service Manager (USM), Unisphere Host 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

EMC MCx FAST Cache : Where’d my Dirty Pages go?

The VNX2/MCx Array release by EMC in 2013 highlighted the whole “multi-core everything” (MCx) software upgrade to make best use of the available CPU cores in the Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 Processors. This allowed for greater parallelism of tasks and big performance improvements across Data services and functions. I’m not 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 Over time, data is aged, clients are reconfigured/deleted and this can all add up to indexes getting out of date, oversized tables etc.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