Random Short Take #14

Posted on 2019-05-17 by dan

Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Episode 14 – giddy-up!

Preston wrote a fantastic article on the why of data protection.
WekaIO recently raised some C round funding. You can read more on that here.
Confused by some of the VMware Cloud nomenclature? Curtis attempts to clarify things in this post.
Rhys Hammond has put together the VMCE 9.5 Unofficial Study Guide and it is worth checking out, particularly if you work with Veeam products and you’re looking to get certified.
If you work with VMware Cloud Director and haven’t visited Stellios’s blog before you’re missing out. Stellios has a wealth of experience from his days as a customer and now works as a VMware TAM in BrisVegas. This article on LDAPS in vCD 9.5 was particularly useful.
This article on the case for SAN 2.0 by Chris M. Evans is worth a read.
And this one by George Crump on hyperscale storage is also worth a look.
The May edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting is being held on the 28th. If you’ll be in the area you can register here. It’s sponsored by Cohesity and should be a lot fo fun. Speaking of Cohesity, I offered up some thoughts on my experiences using Cohesity during their recent Build Day Live event.

EMC – naviseccli – checking your iSCSI ports are running at the correct speed

Posted on 2016-09-07 by dan

It’s been a while since I wrote about naviseccli and I admit I’ve missed it. I once wrote about using naviseccli to identify MirrorView ports on a CLARiiON array. Normally the MirrorView port is consistently located, but in that example we’d upgraded from a CX3-80 to a Cx4-960 and it was in a different spot. Oh how we laughed when we realised what the problem was. Anyway, we’ve been doing some work on an ever so slightly more modern VNX5300 and needed to confirm that some newly installed iSCSI SLICs were operating at the correct speed. (Note that these commands were run from the Control Station).

The first step is to list the ports

=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~= PuTTY log 2016.09.07 08:59:37 =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=
[nasadmin@NAS001 ~]$ navicli -h A_VNXSP connection -getport

SP:  A
Port ID:  8
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.a8
iSCSI Alias:  0017.a8
IP Address:  192.168.0.13
Subnet Mask:  255.255.255.0
Gateway Address:  192.168.0.254
Initiator Authentication:  false

SP:  A
Port ID:  9
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.a9
iSCSI Alias:  0017.a9

SP:  A
Port ID:  10
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.a10
iSCSI Alias:  017.a10

SP:  A
Port ID:  11
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.a11
iSCSI Alias:  017.a11

SP:  B
Port ID:  8
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.b8
iSCSI Alias:  0017.b8
IP Address:  192.168.0.14
Subnet Mask:  255.255.255.0
Gateway Address:  192.168.0.254
Initiator Authentication:  false

SP:  B
Port ID:  9
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.b9
iSCSI Alias:  0017.b9

SP:  B
Port ID:  10
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.b10
iSCSI Alias:  017.b10

SP:  B
Port ID:  11
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.b11
iSCSI Alias:  017.b11

Once you’ve done that, you can list the port speed for a particular port

[nasadmin@NAS001 ~]$ navicli -h A_VNXSP connection -getport -sp a -portid 8 -speed
SP:  A
Port ID:  8
Port WWN:  iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.cetv2223700017.a8
iSCSI Alias:  0017.a8
IP Address:  192.168.0.13
Subnet Mask:  255.255.255.0
Gateway Address:  192.168.0.254
Initiator Authentication:  false
Port Speed:  1000 Mb
Auto-Negotiate:  Yes
Available Speeds:  10 Mb
-               :  100 Mb
-               :  1000 Mb
-               :  Auto

If you have a lot of ports to check this may not be the most efficient way to do it (ioportconfig may be more sensible), but if your network team are reporting on one particular port being an issue – this is a great way to narrow it down.

EMC Elect 2016

Posted on 2016-02-02 by dan

I am very pleased to say that I’ve been once again selected to participate in EMC Elect 2016. If you’re unfamiliar with it, EMC Elect is an EMC programme similar in style to Microsoft’s MVP programme and VMware’s vExpert recognition. You can read more about it here. There’s also a handy FAQ here. This is my third time in four years and I’m excited to be in again. The official list is here, and the people I know on it are all passionate about what they do. Jonathan has a write-up here, Jon has a post here and Rob has a post here.

EMC announces new VNXe

Posted on 2014-05-01 by dan

EMC World is just around the corner and, as is their wont, EMC are kicking off early with a few cheeky product announcements. I don’t have a lot to say about the VNXe, as I don’t do much in that space, but a lot of people might find this recent announcement of interest. If press releases aren’t your thing, here is a marketing slide you might enjoy instead.

The cool thing about this is that the baby is getting the features of the bigger model, namely the FAST Suite, thin provisioning, file dedupe and MCx. Additionally, a processor speed improvement will help with the overall performance of the device. There’s a demo simulator you can check out here.

EMC also announced a new feature for VNX called D@RE, or Data-At-Rest-Encryption. This should be available as an NDU in Q3 2014. I hope to have more info on that in the future.

Finally, Project Liberty was announced. This is basically EMC’s virtualised VNX, and I’ll have more on that in the near future.

And if half-arsed blog posts aren’t your thing, I urge you to check out Jason Gaudreau’s post covering the same announcement. It’s a lot more coherent and useful.

EMC – VNX: Splash Screen weirdness or How I spent my recent public holiday in a DC

Posted on 2014-04-29 by dan

Here’s a picture you don’t see every day.

I spent a recent public holiday assisting a client move some VNX5500s between racks in their data centre. Not terribly exciting, but it helped them out of a spot. Something that was done as part of the shift was a change in SP IP addresses. There’s an article on support.emc.com that refers to Primus ID emc274335 and some Java misconfiguration. I’m not entirely convinced though, because we observed that Unisphere would (eventually) come good, without us making any changes to the client settings. In any case, I thought it was something interesting. The arrays were running VNX OE R31 and R32.

EMC – VNX: USM reports an error “Assistance needed for upgrade”

Posted on 2014-04-14 by dan

If you’re trying to do an OE upgrade on a VNX you might get the following error after you’ve run through the “Prepare for Installation” phase.

Turns out you just need to upgrade USM to the latest version. You can do this manually or via USM. Further information on this error can be found on support.emc.com by searching for the following Primus ID: emc321171.

Incidentally, I’d just like to congratulate EMC on how much simpler it is upgrade FLARE / VNX OE nowadays than it was when I first started on FC and CX arrays. Sooo much nicer …

EMC – VNX / CX4 LUN Allocation Owner and Default Owner

Posted on 2014-03-17 by dan

Mat’s been doing some useful scripting again. This time it’s a small PERL script that identifies the allocation owner and default owner of a pool LUN on a CX4 or VNX and lets you know whether the LUN is “non-optimal” or not. For those of you playing along at home, I found the following information on this (but can’t remember where I found it). “Allocation owner of a pool LUN is the SP that owns and maintains the metadata for that LUN. It is not advised to trespass the LUNs to an SP that is not the allocation owner. This introduces lag. The SP that provides the best performance for the pool LUN. The allocation owner SP is set by the system to match the default SP owner when you create the LUN. You cannot change the allocation owner after the LUN is created. If you change the default owner for the LUN, the software will display a warning that a performance penalty will occur if you continue.”

There’s a useful article by Jithin Nadukandathil on the ECN site, as well as a most excellent writeup by fellow EMC Elect member Jon Klaus here. In short, if you identify NonOptimal LUN ownership, your best option is to create a new LUN and migrate the data to that LUN via the LUN Migration tool. You can download a copy of the script here. Feel free to look at the other scripts that are on offer as well. Here’s what the output looks like.

Stormons Professional Edition Available

Posted on 2014-03-12 by dan

Disclaimer: I don’t work for Stormons, and I’ve not been compensated for this post. I just think it’s a cool product that is worth checking out.

Didier from Stormons recently got in touch to let me know there’s now a Professional version of the software available now as part of a subscription deal. I’ve previously covered Stormons here and here and think it’s pretty good stuff – and definitely worth checking out – particularly if you have a large environment to work with. Apparently EMC in Bangalore are heavy users of the product as well. The Professional Edition is offered on a subscription basis, and they’re running a discounted rate until May to celebrate the release. Find out more about it here. You can also still access the free edition from the downloads page.

EMC – Some new scripts

Posted on 2014-02-26 by dan

Mat has come up with a few new scripts – FlipFASTTiering and ReplicationCapacity. They’re PERL scripts that you can use to list / modify FAST Tiering scheduling and report on MirrorView replication data respectively. Hopefully you’ll find them of some use. Further information can be found on the Utilities page.

EMC – Using naviseccli to report on a LUN’s FAST status

Posted on 2014-02-17 by dan

Ever wondered what tier a LUN was sitting on in a FAST VP pool? Wonder no more, naviseccli is here to help.

C:\>naviseccli -user username -scope 0 -password password -h 1.1.1.1 lun -list -l 24 -userCap -consumedCap -tieringPolicy -initialTier -tiers
LOGICAL UNIT NUMBER 24
Name: LUN_0024
User Capacity (Blocks): 4294967296
User Capacity (GBs): 2048.000
Consumed Capacity (Blocks): 4379120640
Consumed Capacity (GBs): 2088.127
Tiering Policy: Auto Tier
Initial Tier: Optimize Pool
Tier Distribution:
FC: 93.87%
SATA: 6.13%

Also, you can see this information via Unisphere. Those of you who are challenged at the thought of typing something won’t be left out.