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Jun
30thPowerPath/VE : Free trialIf you are lucky enough to have an EMC backed virtual environment to work with; did you know that you can test drive PowerPath Virtual Edition (VE) for free? Go over to: https://community.emc.com/message/11590 and signup for a free 45 day trial. This of course requires you use ISCSI or Fibre (i.e. block storage) with either VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. But, if you have always been curious about what a truly intelligent multipathing could do for your environment, then this is a great way to give it a shot. Also check out the information and video on Chad’s site (http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2010/09/emc-powerpathve-54-sp2-vsphere-enterprise.html). Also, you will need to have at least Enterprise level licensing of vSphere for a VMware environment. .nick
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Feb
5thHow to UBER : New Celerra UBER VSA Guide
I know the UBER version of the Celerra Virtual Storage Appliance has been out for a while. But, finally with some incredible teamwork from the EMC vSpecialist squad I now present the complete Celerra UBER VSA Guide v1. This guide weighs out at 98 pages of material covering:
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Sep
30thSmoothed Edges : Celerra UBER VSA Update v3.1It came to my attention pretty quick that something was amiss with the last Celerra VSA UBER release. I heard strange stories of disks not adding and the OVA not deploying. Since this thing is drawing close on a couple thousand downloads some environmental, transfer, and operational bugs/errors will cause problems. But I finally nailed this down myself when I was doing my iSCSI testing. I had run into a SRM bug (see post here) this week. And as I was parsing the logs I noticed a couple lines that confirmed it. There was definitely a bug as iSCSI objects were not pulling the new instantiated ID that is created with the wizard. So after 8 hours or so of diving through and reversing engineering I finally found the culprit. It went all the way back to the original build I get from engineering. I wrote a patch, tested against my running VSA’s, and confirmed I had the fix. But while I was about rebuilding the VSA’s I decided to do a couple more things that didn’t make the last list. Here is the running list of changes: Bugfix: Passphrase for peer connections is will now save correctly. This is related to the ID bug. Before if you rebooted the VSA replications (NFS or iSCSI) would no longer work. Bugfix: iSCSI replication now creates LUN’s and Replication sessions with proper naming ID’s. Bugfix: NTP settings for Data Mover will update time during wizard immediately to correct large skew. Bugfix: Either [...]
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Sep
29thFix coming soon : DART 6.0 / iSCSI / SRM Celerra SRA
So transparency is a good thing right? Especially since I just found out I have a ‘vendor’ blog *eek* I will make this short and sweet. I have been working on a home lab SRM thingy for a couple weeks. I had completed all my testing with NFS replication and plug-ins. Pretty darn sweet stuff but that is another post coming. When I moved on to the the iSCSI testing everything was kosher until I ran into issues with the Celerra Replicator SRA. It will crash out with a ‘discoverLuns’ error when searching the Celerra for the replicated session. In my lab I am using the new DART 6.0 UBER VSA. Turns out this issue is known and just related to a naming change. EMC already has a fix (I tested and it works) and it is on its way through the official channels as we speak. So once again with iSCSI replicated sessions on DART 6.0 there is an issue with the ‘discoverLuns’ command only. This does not affect the NFS replication with the Celerra SRA or other Clariion, Recoverpoint, Symmetrix replications/SRA’s. As soon as the release is out watch for it here or on Chad’s site. .nick
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