Dell EMC Unity – Bulk create Filesystems & NFS/SMB Shares

I’ve been quite impressed by the new UI for the new Unity arrays. The pains of JAVA/Flash annoyances are a thing of the past with the new sleek, smooth interface on board. There are still some things missing however. One of the tasks I had before me was to create Continue Reading

Dell EMC Unity – Bulk create Filesystems & NFS/SMB Shares

I’ve been quite impressed by the new UI for the new Unity arrays. The pains of JAVA/Flash annoyances are a thing of the past with the new sleek, smooth interface on board. There are still some things missing however. One of the tasks I had before me was to create Continue Reading

AWS and PowerShell – Let’s be friends Part 1

I first used AWS approximately 4 years ago. At that time, programmatic management of services was not an easy hurdle to jump and required regular ‘feeding & watering’. Naturally, these tools have matured greatly so whatever tool-set you are most comfortable with has a well developed set of features/options available Continue Reading

EMC XtremIO PowerShell support – Finally!

EMC have released XIOS version 4.1.10-33 and XMS version 4.2 recently, and although they look like minor point releases, there are some long awaited improvements that I certainly have been pleased with. The first one is a PowerShell support. Readers of this blog will now I’m a big PowerShell guy. Continue Reading

VMware ESXi – Get VM’s by VLAN ID with PowerCLI

Often when when working in large environments you’ll get interesting requests. These may be to assist in troubleshooting, auditing, reporting or any other reason. I was recently requested to provide a list of mac addresses for every VM with a vNIC in a specific vlan. I had a feeling this was going 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 Over time, data is aged, clients are reconfigured/deleted and this can all add up to indexes getting out of date, oversized tables etc.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

EMC VNX/VNX2 – Naviseccli & Powershell – Bulk config changes with ease

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 Continue Reading

EMC VNX – Auto Array Configuration Backups using NavisecCLI and Powershell

Following on from yesterday’s EOY backup topic for ESXi, today I’ll document how to automate the backup of your  VNX & VNX2 Array configurations. As usual, I want this to be automated, set-and-forget and reliable. A combination of NavisecCLI and Powershell works beautifully for this. Without any doubt, the best documentation Continue Reading

Auto ESXi Host Configuration Backups with PowerCLI

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 Continue Reading

VAAI- Hear me now, believe me later

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 Continue Reading