I recently participated a technical trouble shooting regarding UCS jumbo frame setting to support NetApp SolidFire iSCSI storage. When the UCS MTU value in QoS setting is changed to 9216, the connection between UCS and NetApp SolidFire is lost. However, the new UCS QoS setting could be supported by the NetApp FAS iSCSI system in the same environment. A diagram as below illustrates the situation.
Although Unity has been in the market for more than a year, until recently, I got a chance to configure a pair of Unity with file replication. If you were a VNX/Celerra user, there are 3 points you need to be aware to configure the file system replication on Unity.
When replicating existing File Systems or VMware NFS Datastores with asynchronous replication, you must first configure replication for the NAS Server it is mounted on. It is not supported to replicate file system to a different Unity NAS server at the remote site.
When deleting a NAS server, the related file system must be deleted as well.
I am recently working on an environment need to back up a 10TB SQL server by Networker and Data Domain. By utilizing DDBoost ans saveset “MSSQL:”, the backup job could be done in 13 hours for the daily full backup. This is not the worst result to backup a SQL server in 10TB, but we still can optimize it with some settings in Networker.
Recently I got a task to run a command or script to delete files in a given folder after a success backup. In general, there are two major ways, one way is to use PowerShell script and include Networker backup command, and the other way is to use EMC Networker customized backup command. I chose to use the second way because it is more closely integrated with Networker and easier to manage and monitor.
I follow the steps as below:
I recently worked on a performance turning for the backup solution with below components:
The backup client is Avamar NDMP node at both sites. The 50TB ISILON CIFS shares can be backed up in 2 hours by Avamar through NDMP. However, the replication of the daily backup to peer DC can take more than 24 hours.
From EMC Networker Module for Microsoft (NMM) version 9.1, EMC introduces the new feature “SQL Flat File Recovery”, no exciting, but really a helpful feature for the DBA and Backup admin.
Before EMC Networker NMM version 9.1, the MS SQL database only can be recovered to the SQL database, either to the original database or a different database. Since SQL database and Networker are usually managed by different teams, restoring directly to the database increases the internal communication between different teams to get the task done correctly. By introducing “SQL Flat File Recovery”, Networker admin can recover the database flat file to the desired location and DBA can recover the flat file to SQL database after that at any time.
NMM 9.1 can be used with Networker server version 8.2.3 or later with some limitations stated in the administrator guide.
For any work you did, some easy task always turned to be tough if you were not lucky enough. I did a VNX5600 OE for File upgrade recently, while the whole process should be quite easy to follow as below:
The beginning of the process went well (health check and MD5 checksum), then began the upgrade steps. It looked good until …. the Windows 8 on my laptop crashed! When the Window boot back to normal, I restarted the USM and try to continue the upgrade process and got below error:
Can’t upgrade because another upgrade is in progress. ‘upgrade’ is already locked by (xxxx,xxxxxxxxx) and it is currently ‘running’ The upgrade/install lock is taken by another process. Wait for the other upgrade/install to complete.