Changing the Login banner on a Celerra / VNX File control station
If you have a security requirement to change the login screen on operating systems that are accessible via a terminal session, it’s a farily easy change on a Celerra or VNX File control station due to...
View ArticleTroubleshooting NAS Discovery issues on EMC Ionix Control Center (ECC)
We recently converted two of our existing VNX arrays to unified systems, and I was attempting to add our newly added NAS to Control Center. I went through the normal assisted discovery using the ‘NAS...
View ArticleWhat is EMC’s CAVA / Common Event Enabler?
I was recently asked to do a bit of research on EMC’s CAVA product, as we are looking for AntiVirus solutions for our CIFS based shares. I found very little info with general google searches about...
View ArticleCreating an NFS export from a file system on a Virtual Data Mover (VDM)
When creating a new file system on a virtual data mover, you may have noticed that it can’t be NFS exported from within Unisphere. From the GUI, file systems associated with a VDM do not appear on the...
View ArticleUsing Microsoft’s BranchCache with the Celerra & VNX
We recently moved the data from several of our small offices to being hosted at a central regional data center. In one case, a site that formerly had it’s own Celerra for file access was now accessing...
View ArticleWhat is VPLEX?
We are looking at implementing a storage virtualization device and I started doing a bit of research on EMC’s product offering. Below is a summary of some of the information I’ve gathered, including a...
View ArticleComparing Dot Hill and EMC Auto Tiering
The problem with auto tiering in general is that a large amount of hot I/Os is “hot” only for a brief moment in time. Workloads are not uniform across an entire data set constantly and if the data...
View ArticleEasy reporting on data domain using the autosupport log
I was looking for an easy (and free) way to do some daily reporting on our data domain hardware. I was most interested in reporting on disk space, but decided to gather some other data as well. The...
View ArticleScripting automatic reports for Isilon from the CLI
We recently set up a virtual demo of an Isilon system on our network as we are evaluating Isilon for a possible purchase. You can obtain a virtual node that runs on ESX from your local EMC Isilon...
View ArticleCelerra / VNX File replication job creation errors when selecting destination
I recently had an issue with setting up a new Celerra file system replication job. As soon as I selected the destination system I received the three errors below. 1) Query VDMs All. Cannot access any...
View ArticleGathering performance data on a virtual windows server
When troubleshooting a potential storage related performance problem on a virtual windows server, it’s a bit more difficult to anaylze a because many virtual hosts share the same LUN for a datastore in...
View ArticleHow to create a clone of a file system on a Celerra or VNX using nas_copy
Below are the steps used to create a clone of a file system on a Celerra or VNX. Cloning can be done to the same data mover, a different data mover on the same array, or to a completely different...
View ArticleHow to reserve a Celerra / VNX NAS share for a single file type or group of...
Several years ago I posted on Celerra/VNX NAS file extension filtering (see here), but didn’t write about file system reservations for specific file types, which is also possible. You can set up NAS...
View ArticleCelerra Disk Provisioning Wizard incorrectly believes there are not enough...
I recently had an issue attempting to extend our production NAS file pool on our NS-960. We had just added Six new 2TB SATA disks to the array, and when I launched the Disk Provisioning Wizard it gave...
View ArticleUsing the server_stats command on Celerra / VNX File
Server_stats is a CLI based real time performance monitoring tool from EMC for the Celerra and VNX file. This post is meant to give a quick overview of the server_stats command with some samples on...
View ArticleDynamic allocation pool limit has been reached
We were having issues with our backup jobs failing on CIFS share backups using Symantec Netbackup. The jobs died with a “status 24”, which means it was losing communicaiton with the source. Our...
View ArticleThe steps for NFS exporting a file system on a VDM
I made a blog post back in January 2014 about creating an NFS export on a virtual data mover but I didn’t give much detail on the commands you need to use to actually do it. As I pointed out back then,...
View ArticleMatching LUNs and UIDs when presenting VPLEX LUNs to Unix hosts
Our naming convention for LUNs includes the pool ID, LUN number, server name, filesystem/drive letter, last four digits of the array’s serial number, and size (in GB). Having all of this information in...
View ArticleVPLEX Health Check
This is a brief post to share the CLI commands and sample output for a quick VPLEX health check. Our VPLEX had a dial home event and below are the commands that EMC ran to verify that it was healthy....
View ArticleVPLEX initiator paths dropped
We recently ran into an SP bug check on one of our VNX arrays and after it came back up several of the initiator paths to the VPLEX did not come back up. We were also seeing IO timeouts. This is a...
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