I’m a big believer in “helping yourself”. By researching and actually doing things, we learn, grow and become more self-sufficient. I’ve blogged before about what I sometimes refer to as hidden gems, in particular MiTrend. There are other tools from EMC that are very useful. The first is My Documents (MyDocs), which is targeted at […]
The release of XtremIO V4 earlier this year delivered a lot of improvements to an already powerful package. One of the improvements I have been keen to explore was the ability to manage multiple clusters from a single XMS console. The benefits I see are obvious… A single management point for multiple clusters, consolidated reporting, and […]
First time in a little while, but another EMC TA bulletin arrived in my inbox last week. The inclusion of “potential data unavailability” in the subject got my attention. Full release here This particular bulletin affects only VNX Series 1 Arrays (5300, 5500, 5700 and 7500) that are upgrading to Block OE R32.217 or R32.218. […]
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 both VPLEX clusters and monitors heartbeats […]
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. I still had the service […]
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, the VNXe1600. Clearly aimed […]
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 coverage. The ability to recover […]
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 to change is the “Managed […]
Storage Pool Expansion on EMC VNX/MCx arrays is a simple, straightforward task that can be done to increase capacity, performance or both. It is an online operation (NDU) but I always try to initiate it when load on an array is non-peak. The process is just like a Fast VP data relocation. Of course there’s […]
Storage Pool Expansion on EMC VNX/MCx arrays is a simple, straightforward task that can be done to increase capacity, performance or both. It is an online operation (NDU) but I always try to initiate it when load on an array is non-peak. The process is just like a Fast VP data relocation. Of course there’s […]