Varrow Blogs

I learned something new about NFS exports on a recent EMC NS480 project. The client I was working with wanted some CIFS shares that could be accessed by both Windows and NFS clients at the same time. I initially thought that this wouldn’t be possible because the CIFS shares were going to be on a [...]

First off, the “Skin a cat” thing is just a figure of speech so if you’re a cat lover don’t report me to PETA.  I would never do something like that…….well…….unless the damn thing bit me or really pissed me off, then all bets are off!  Actually I’m sure this will make good FUD for [...]

It’s all over for the 146GB drives.  Last week EMC announced that the 146GB fibre channel disk drives will no longer be available for new Clariion and Celerra platforms.  I don’t see this as a huge deal to most customers but for some very specific applications the drives were very useful.  Some databases that we [...]

I recently setup Celerra Repliator v2 between an old NS to a new NS to migrate CIFS shares and VDM configuration. The replication worked great and replicated 3 TB of data in about 30 hours. Once replication was complete I switched over the files system and VDM replication sessions in Celerra Manager. The switcheover went [...]

While at the Carolina VMware Summit on Friday, which was excellent, I had a conversation with someone from EMC that I work with frequently.  He mentioned that EMC was really trying to get the word out about their Celerra VSA offering.  They want customers to get it, use it, test it, and get used to [...]

I wanted to shutdown our EMC Celerra the other day and the proper way to do this is to halt the data mover, once all of the hosts are turned off.  Here is the command:
server_cpu server_2 -halt
This will shutdown the data mover altogether.  You can verify this by doing a “/nas/sbin/getreason”.
In order to bring it [...]

To highlight a bold new feature brought to the Celerra line, the following are relevant points that may be questioned during an average “what does what” 3D conversation.  And of course all of this is spelled out clearly here, so don’t take my word for it. Onward…
You know its funny, never say never in this [...]

A common topic that comes up when implementing a new Celerra for a customer is how to configure networking.  What’s the point of five nines of uptime if your networking isn’t reliable?  So, what to do?  The Celerra offers some great options for high available network configuration.  Most built on industry standard items…a few proprietary [...]

Celerra shop? Excellent.  You’ve taken the necessary steps to invest in the most unified, performance driven platform on the market today. Now what? Well in most situations tweaking your array is not necessary, those fine individuals at EMC know what configurations are appropriate for specific types of access, read/write profiling, and plan accordingly. But there [...]

Unification, confluence…the time for convergence is now.  Timely, you know? Multiprotocol and Multi-feature arrays are hotter than a stolen tamale, and why wouldn’t they be. CIFS, iSCSI, FC, NFS, 3D (dedup), and replication (of some flavor) just to spiff the fire all shelled within in a single iron frame. Its quite poetic if you ask [...]

Here is a little “mini-healthcheck” for the EMC Celerra.
1) Log in as nasadmin and su to root
2) Type “/nbsnas/sbin/enclosure_status -e 0 -v”.   You will get a quick all-around healthcheck of the hardware of the entire unit:
[root@ns20-prod nasadmin]# /nbsnas/sbin/enclosure_status -e 0 -v
 DEVICE A                         DEVICE B
——————-PRESENCE——————–
 00 60 16 0B 48 11    MAC     00 60 16 0B 48 [...]

Continuing on with the video demonstrations I have prepared one showing the Celerra’s autoextending filesystem feature.  This feature lets you set high watermarks on a filesystem and automatically extend it should it hit those marks.  This is a great feature for the overworked administrator so you don’t get paged on a weekend when a user [...]

So I was playing with SRM in our new Charlotte lab.  I must say, it’s nice having a couple of EMC Celerra NS20s all to yourself.  Anyway…I hit a problem with the SRA when configuring Site Recovery Manager and thought I’d pass along a little note.  The error I got was:
Invalid XML returned from storage [...]

This post will be the first of several where I discuss the different Rainfinity offerings from EMC.  In the effort of continuing their strategy of moving to a complete data management company EMC acquired Rainfinity in August of 2005.  Rainfinity was already well known as providing excellent products to help organizations manage their data.
The three [...]

Recently Chad Sakac wrote an article on using some PowerShell scripts to quickly deploy VDI replicas.  As always, it’s a very good article but I wanted to expound a bit on what he has written and provide more instruction on setup and use.  I have had the opportunity to use and demo these scripts lately [...]