"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
My colleague Jonas Rosland (@virtualswede) has been doing some great work with Splunk recently (check out a post from his blog here) and it got me to want to get my own hands a little dirty. So far I’ve only scratched the surface on what can be done with Splunk but I decided to put a post together on some basics. For this post I am going to talk about Symmetrix VMAX logs and how to get those into Splunk.
Recently I had a partner/customer who was migrating a lot of SAP data from one VMAX to another VMAX and they ran into an issue they weren’t sure how to solve, well at least what the best way to solve it was. This person had a ton of data on the VMAX and more than a few TimeFinder/VP Snap point-in-time copies of each SAP volume that they used for testing/recovery or backup.
For those of you unfamiliar with VP Snap it is a rather new (introduced with 5876) method of local replication on the VMAX that leverages the space-efficiency benefits of TimeFinder/Snap but also offers the flexibility of configuration provided by TimeFinder/Clone.
Continue reading “Migrating TimeFinder/VP Snap PiT copies to another VMAX”
Quick overview, the SRDF Storage Replication Adapter for VMware SRM TechBook is an in-depth implementation guide focused on how to install, configure and manager SRDF with VMware’s vCenter Site Recovery Manager product. Overview of SRDF, the involved tools and how to perform test recovery, migrations and disaster recovery failovers.
My last hurrah with this TechBook! Since I have moved on to a new (and exciting!) role within the Open Innovation Lab in the EMC Office of the CTO it is time for me to pass on the torch of the SRM TechBook.
Anyways you can find the updated TechBook here:
Continue reading “Updated SRDF Storage Replication Adapter for VMware SRM 5.5 TechBook”
Today EMC posted the updated SRDF Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) 5.5 for Symmetrix VMAX arrays to their website:
https://download.emc.com/downloads/DL49914_EMCSRDFSRA_5.5.0.0.exe.exe
It will be on VMware’s site shortly:
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=SRM_SRA&productId=357&rPId=4220
This adapter includes support for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.5 (as well as “legacy” support for SRM 5.1).
Continue reading “Updated SRDF Storage Replication Adapter released for SRM 5.5”
So I (Drew Tonnesen, @drewtonnesen) am guest blogging again here at Cody’s site. I’ll add my name now in the beginning to avoid the confusion (yes there has been) that this post isn’t from Cody but given the blog URL I suppose it is inevitable no matter what I do. And since I am not starting my own blog which would more likely contain hints on how to avoid going insane with kids (yes alcohol helps) I trust the readers can figure it out. On to the post…
I’ve been working on this new release for EMC Storage Analytics (ESA) 2.0 for what seems like ages now. The first two releases of ESA (1.0, 1.5) supported the VNX platforms. The 2.0 release is the first with VMAX support! As the Symmetrix engineering contact for the VMAX component of ESA, I have had first-hand input and testing of the product, along with putting together a good part of the documentation. This post jumps the gun a little as the product will be officially revealed next week at VMworld but what’s a little pre-announcement among friends? I’ll give a brief run-down of the release below.
Continue reading “EMC Storage Analytics (ESA) 2.0 with VMAX arrays”
This is a topic that I get asked about a lot and a recent internal email thread prompted me to write a post about it. On a Symmetrix array if you want a volume larger than 240 GB you need to create a metavolume. When creating a metavolume you have two configuration choices; concatenated or striped. There are many benefits to striped over concatenated (all of them performance-related) but one disadvantage. Due to their nature striped metavolumes are harder to expand. Until a few years ago thin striped metas couldn’t even be expanded online. So the decision was easy–do you think you will need to expand or not. In Enginuity 5875 and Solutions Enabler online expansion of striped metavolumes was allowed.
Today (August 14th 2013) EMC released the latest version of the EMC Storage Integrator, version 3.0. I blogged about ESI a few weeks back and the PowerShell cmdlets that it offered:
https://www.codyhosterman.com/2013/07/29/scripting-esi-powershell-cmdlets-and-vmware/
This release fills in some of the gaps that were present in earlier versions–especially when it comes to VMAX storage provisioning. The flagship features of this release though are:
Cody recently posted an entry that discussed how Solutions Enabler can be configured to send logs to VMware vCenter Log Insight (https://www.codyhosterman.com/2013/07/10/using-vmwares-vcenter-log-insight-with-symmetrix-vmax/). He mentioned that in order for Unisphere for VMAX to send its information, additional configuration was required. So here is that additional information.
Continue reading “Log Insight with Symmetrix VMAX – revisited for Unisphere”
EMC offers a variety of tools to manage/enhance your virtual or physical environments–some free, some licensed. In most cases when you think of EMC tools for VMware one conjures up the free Virtual Storage Integrator which is more commonly referred to as VSI.
VSI is a great tool and continues to be improved through each version and allows you to provision storage, manage pathing, configure SRM etc. The one thing it does not have is a way to automate these tasks through an API or CLI. This is where another product comes in–one that many do not associate with VMware. The EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) is a lot of times seen as the Microsoft version of VSI–but that isn’t really true at all. While it might have started out that way and does indeed support Hyper-V and has a ton of Microsoft-specific features it is really the heterogeneous storage integrator. Importantly it has a very handy and powerful feature–PowerShell cmdlets.
Continue reading “Scripting ESI PowerShell cmdlets and VMware”
A bit of a long one here. At some point this might turn into a white paper (update: it is now). But for now…
Check out my post on the Pure Storage integration with Log Insight here!
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UPDATE: We have released a content pack that automatically configures dashboards and fields for the VMAX, it will save you a lot of work and the pack is free! Read about it here:
https://www.codyhosterman.com/2013/08/09/the-vmax-content-pack-for-vmware-vcenter-log-insight/
And updated here:
http://drewtonnesen.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/auditing-with-the-vmax-content-pack-v1-5-1/
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Earlier this summer VMware announced a new product called vCenter Log Insight which just went GA today. You can download it and try it out from here:
http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-log-insight/
Continue reading “Using VMware vCenter Log Insight with Symmetrix VMAX”