How To: Remove a volume from NAS backup in Simpana 10

March 8, 2016 by derek.hennessy Posted in SnapProtect Tagged CommVault OEM, Remove volume, SImpana 10, SnapProtect Leave a comment

I have an issue recently where I had to remove a volume from within a NAS client subclient so that I could move it to another location within our environment. Due to the limitations within Simpana10/SnapProtect v10 it’s not possible to select the volume and delete the related snapshots to clean up the subclient. The backup jobs need to be deleted to remove the snapshots. As there are multiple volumes within the same subclient deleting the jobs would delete the snapshots for all volumes, not just the one I need to clean up. Given this, there is only one option and that’s to break the relationships in DFM and clean up the volume manually.

Step 1: Go the the OnCommand server and run dfpm dataset list

C:Usersderek>dfpm dataset list

Id Name Protection Policy Provisioning Policy Application Policy Storage Service

2927 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-45 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-66

3072 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-46 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-66

2935 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-39 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-70

7011 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-42 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-70

41601 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-72 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-70

2811 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-7 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-74

20149 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-68 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-102

25497 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-83 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-110

26575 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-102 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-124

26094 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-98 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-124

31037 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-122 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-128

31650 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-41 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-130

31654 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-72 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-130

42833 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-59 SnapProtect Mirror, then back up CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-136

45647 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-128 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-145

46010 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-127 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-147

46084 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-43 SnapProtect Back up, then mirror CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-151

59566 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-4 SnapProtect Back up CC-SnapProtect-XX_Copy-159

Step 2: Pick the dataset you want to manage and display the relationships in DFM suing the dataset list -m command

C:Usersderek>dfpm dataset list -m 42833

Id Node Name Dataset Id Dataset Name Member Type Name

43325 Primary data 42833 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-59 qtree primary_controller:/users/-

2244 Primary data 42833 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-59 qtree primary_controller:/backup/-

3165 Primary data 42833 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-59 qtree primary_controller:/ctx/-

42965 Mirror 42833 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-59 volume local_aux_controller:/SP_ctx

51886 Mirror 42833 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-59 volume local_aux_controller:/SP_users

42968 Mirror 42833 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-59 volume local_aux_controller:/SP_backup

52126 Backup 42833 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-59 volume remote_aux_controller:/SP_users

43084 Backup 42833 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-59 volume remote_aux_controller:/SP_ctx

43087 Backup 42833 CC-SnapProtect-XX_SC-59 volume remote_aux_controller:/SP_backup

Step 3: DFM Backup and CommServe DB Backup

dfm backup create backup_file_name

Run a DR backup in SnapProtect/Commvault

You can also capture a snapshot in vCenter also just to be sure

Step 4: Run dfpm dataset relinquish <id of secondary resource you want to remove> to break the relationships in DFM.

dfpm dataset relinquish 43087

dfpm dataset relinquish 42968

Step 5: Then, edit the dataset and remove the secondary resource if it is still part of the dataset via the Management Console

Step 6: In SnapProtect remove the volume from the subclient so that it’s no longer backed up.

And that’s that. You can now use the volume in other storage policies without it impacting another configuration

How to: Present iSCSI storage from a NetApp vfiler (7-Mode)

March 4, 2016 by derek.hennessy Posted in Netapp Tagged 7-Mode, iSCSI, LUN, NAS, NetApp, protocols, vFiler Leave a comment

As part of a recent data migration I had to enable a vfiler to allow iSCSI traffic as a number of virtual machines in the environment require block storage for clustering reasons. The vfiler already presents via NFS and iSCSI. As this is a test environment I’ve decided to put iSCSI on the same link as the NFS and CIFS. I know this is not normal best practice but given that the vLANs are already in place and that this is a test environment I decided to use the same IP address range. The servers accessing the iSCSI LUNs don’t have access to CIFS or to any NFS mounts already so there should be no traffic cross-over. So onto the steps to set it up:

Step 1: Allow iscsi protocol and RSH on vfiler (at vfiler0)

Check the status of the vfiler using the command

vfiler status -a tenant_vfiler
tenant_vfiler running
 ipspace: tenant_vfiler_NFS_CIFS
 IP address: 192.168.2.1 [a1a-107]
 IP address: 192.168.2.2 [a1a-107]
 Path: /vol/tenant_vfiler_vol0 [/etc]
 Path: /vol/nfs03
 Path: /vol/nfs04
 Path: /vol/nfs02
 Path: /vol/nfs01
 Path: /vol/cifs01
 Path: /vol/iso01
 Path: /vol/iscsi_test
 UUID: 93c62e36-4e76-11e4-8721-123478563412
 Protocols allowed: 7
Disallowed: proto=rsh
 Allowed: proto=ssh
 Allowed: proto=nfs
 Allowed: proto=cifs
Disallowed: proto=iscsi
 Allowed: proto=ftp
 Allowed: proto=http
 Protocols disallowed: 2

Next run the command:

vfiler allow tenant_vfiler proto=iscsi

vfiler allow tenant_vfiler proto=rsh

Step 2: Start iSCSI protocol on vfiler (at apaubmwvfi01)

vfiler context tenant_vfiler

iscsi start

Step 3: Create a new volume at vfiler0

vfiler context vfiler0

vol create iscsi_test_vol -s 20g

Step 4: Migrate the volume to apaubmwvfi01 and log into the vfielr to check the volume status

vfiler add tenant_vfiler /vol/iscsi_test

vfiler context tenant_vfiler

vol status

Step 5: Set priv advanced and modify the exports to the correct settings as below

To modify the exports read the current /exports and write it back. Once done run the exportsfs -av command to push the changes out

rdfile /vol/tenant_vfiler_vol0/etc/exports

/vol/nfs01 -sec=sys,rw=192.168.1.0/24,anon=0
/vol/nfs02 -sec=sys,rw=192.168.1.0/24,anon=0
/vol/nfs03 -sec=sys,rw=192.168.1.0/24,anon=0
/vol/nfs04 -sec=sys,rw=192.168.1.0/24,anon=0
/vol/iso01 -sec=sys,rw=192.168.1.0/24,anon=0
/vol/iscsi_test -sec=sys,rw=192.168.1.0/24,anon=0

vfiler run tenant_vfiler exportfs -av

Step 6: Create a lun from the volume (iscsi_test)

vfiler run tenant_vfiler lun create -s 10g -t windows2008 /vol/iscsi_test/iscsi_lun

Step 7: Change filer and run lun show

Step 8: Verify iSCSI network within VMware has been assigned to the VM

Step 9: Enable iSCSI Initiator – grab the iqn

Step 10: Create an igroup with the iqn of the server

igroup create -t Windows2008 ds_iscsi 
igroup add ds_iscsi iqn.1991-05.com.microsoft:microsoft:server.domain.com

Step 11: map the lun to the group name

Step 12: run lun show -m to check the mapping

Step 13: Run a quick connect to the IP address of the controller

And now your disk should appear in the disk manager on the server. It’s not too different to setting up a normal iSCSI connection but RSH must be enabled otherwise it can’t tunnel the iSCSI request to the vfiler iqn target.

Cisco HyperFlex – Welcome to the HCI Party!

March 2, 2016 by derek.hennessy Posted in Cisco, HyperFlex Tagged Cisco, Cisco UCS, HCI, Hyper Converged, HyperFlex, Scaling Leave a comment

Cisco has finally decided to bring the vodka to spike the punch at the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure party. And it tastes pretty damn good. There have been rumours for a while now that Cisco was working with Springpath and as a major third round investor it’s not surprising to hear about their entrance into the HCI arena. The Register’s Chris Mellor reported about Something bubbling up at Springpath back in early December. So what is the offspring of Cisco and Springpath called? Cisco HyperFlex!!

The Play:

Hyper-converged systems so far have delivered on simplicity and scale but there’s been a massive gap in the lack of network integration in existing solutions. Yes you can use top of rack fast switches. In some cases customers use Cumulus on whitebox top-of-rack switches for software defined networking but networking is not a built in feature of the two leading hyper-converged solutions, Nutanix and Simplivity.

HyperFlex joins the comprehensive DC portfolio along with UCS, MDS and Nexus. It means that Cisco now has a play in traditional component based infrastructure, converge infrastructure and now hyper-converged infrastructure. Cisco is adding HyperFlex to provide it with another string to its software defined infrastructure. It will now have:

UCS – compute (service profiles, APIs etc.)
ACI – for software defined network
HyperFlex- software defined storage, compute and network

On the initial release Cisco HyperFlex will support file storage and VMware. There are a number of other storage types, such as block and object, and hypervisors on the roadmap. There’s also going to be container support. Given that Springpath was hypervisor agnostic I’d expect a quick ramp up from Cisco and fast feature release cycle.

The Potential:

Like pretty much every other hyper-converged solution Cisco sees its expected use-cases to be:

VDI
Server virtualisation
Test and development
Large remote branch offices

UCS Manager is already familiar to multiple thousands of customers worldwide and the server and network deployment settings in HyperFlex come from pre-configured Service Profiles. Service Profiles are well and truly familiar to anyone that has worked with Cisco UCS. Given that customer base and the familiarity with existing management tools there’s massive potential for Cisco HyperFlex here. There are some well developed existing incumbents in the hyper-converged market with Nutanix leading the way and HyperFlex will allow Cisco to gain a foothold in that rapidly growing market.

The Deep-dive: Read More

Melbourne VMUG Review

February 27, 2016 by derek.hennessy Posted in VMUG, VMware Tagged Career skills, Community, MVMUG, VMUG, VMUG Review, VMware 1 Comment

Once again the Melbourne VMUG UserCon was a massive success and had some great speakers and sessions. Given that there were such IT heavy hitters as Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe), Chris Wahl (@chriswahl) and Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) as well as a number of local IT stars such as Frank Fan (@frankfan7), Anthony Burke (@pandom_), Anthony Spiteri (@anthonyspiteri) and Craig Waters (@cswaters1) it’s not surprising that it was a great event

One of my goals for the day was to attend a number of the community sessions. I found the vBrownBag sessions conducted by Alastair Cooke (@demitassenz) to be the most informative and entertaining sessions of the day, along with those of Chris Wahl. The award for the funniest session of the day went to Simon Sharwood (@ssharwood) from the Register as part of the vBrownBag session. It wasn’t just entertaining but a great insight into how content is derived for the site.

I missed one of the sessions I had intended on getting to but here’s a break down of the sessions I did attend.

Melbourne VMUG – Preview

February 22, 2016 by derek.hennessy Posted in VMUG, VMware Tagged Community, MVMUG, UserConn, VMUG, VMware Leave a comment

The annual Melbourne VMUG UserCon takes place this Thursday, 25th February. It’s also an important day for me as it’s my wedding anniversary. I know which one my wife is more interested in! But, for the IT community in Melbourne all eyes will be on the VMUG. This years event has moved location from the old Hilton on the Park to Crown on Southbank. I think this is a good move and makes the VMUG even more accessible than in previous years. Last years guest speakers were excellent with Chad Sakac, Vaughan Stewart and John Troyer and this year it’s been lifted another notch again. This year the enterprise IT giants include Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe), Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), Brad Tompkins (@VMUG_CEO) and my own personal IT hero Chris Wahl (@ChrisWahl). There’s also going to be vBrownBag sessions being hosted by Alastair Cooke (@demitassenz). If you’ve been following twitter you’ll have seen that Scott’s been having issues with flights and has had United basically crap all over his plans. Hopefully things work out for him and he can make it on time to the Sydney VMUG on Tuesday 23rd but it looks like it’ll be a close call. I wish him safe travels from here on.

VMUGs are all about the community. It’s the primary reason it exists and we’re incredibly fortunate to have the organisers volunteer their time to put on such a great event. Melbourne has some of the finest at its helm and that has been recognised globally. If you haven’t attended before I’d highly recommend fitting it into your calendar. You’ll be glad you did and your employer will be glad you did too. It’s really worth getting to the keynotes at the UserCon as unlike keynotes at other events they are not strictly vendor focused and they can provide some real insight into your industry as a whole and even your career path. But the main focus should be the community speeches. Hearing from others out in the field about the trials and tribulations they’ve had with specific technology is where the real learning takes place. These contribute a shorter part of the agenda and it’s something I’d like to see more of in future events but I also appreciate that it’s hard to get speakers for such sessions. For me this year that’ll be my focus outside of the keynotes. There are a number of vendor based sessions as well throughout the day that delve into new technology .

There’s a lot of information and knowledge to be gleaned from this event. I’d also recommend working out your agenda before attending and have a ponder over what you’d like to get out of the event. The sessions I’m planning on attending are:

Keynote – Adding A Business Skill to Your Tool Belt – Keith Townsend
vBrownBag Tech Talk: What’s All This Flash Stuff About Anyway? – Craig Waters
Mastering PowerShell to Call RESTful API Endpoints – Chris Wahl
vBrownBag Tech Talk: Giving Your Career the 1-2 Punch – Keith Townsend & Scott Lowe
VSAN: Technical What’s Latest, and “An Administrator’s Daily View” – Greg Mulholland & Ramon Valery
Bring Visibility to Any Cloud, Any App, & Any Device – Paco Cañive, ExtraHop Networks
vBrownBag Tech Talk: How the Sausage Machine Works to Bring You IT News
vSphere Troubleshooting Methodology and Best Practices – Donovan Durand
VMware Keynote: The Future of Network virtualisation with VMware NSX – Scott Lowe

Unfortunately the community sessions clash in times but if they didn’t I’d attend the following. As I can only be in one place at one time I’ll be at the Chris Wahl session.

The Power of the Community – Open Conversation about VMUG, VMware and the Digital Business Landscape – Brad Tompkins
The Price is Wrong: Why Projects Run Late, and People Buy Cloud – Jusin Warren
Picking Up New Skills – Tips and Tricks to Build Your Technical Tool Chest – Chris Wahl

UCS Director 5.4 – Post upgrade NetApp storage connection issue

February 12, 2016 by derek.hennessy Posted in Cisco Tagged Cisco Champion, Cisco UCS Director, NetApp, NetApp UCSD, SSL, UCSD Leave a comment

After a recent upgrade to UCS Director 5.4 I noticed that my storage connections were showing a status of failed on the dashboard. I went to Administration -> Physical Accounts -> Physical Accounts. All of my NetApp controllers were offline.

I went to edit settings and re-entered my password to make sure that it had been picked up correctly.

All the settings were fine so I saved them and tested the connection to the controllers again.

The connection failed with the following error:

500 Connection has been shutdown: javax.net.ssl.SSLHandsakeException:

Server chose SSLv3, but that protocol version is not enabled or not supported by the client.

How To: UCS Director 5.4 Patch 1 update

February 12, 2016 by derek.hennessy Posted in Cisco, How-To, UCS Tagged Cisco Champion, Cisco UCSD, UCS Director, UCSD upgrade 1 Comment

After the recent upgrade to 5.4 I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to 5.4.1. Go to the download software portal for Cisco. Download the 5.4.1.zip patch file. I had a number of issue with the download as the checksum didn’t match. I had to take a number of attempts to get the file in-tact. I believe the issue was the ISA that acts as our internet proxy. Death to the ISA!!!!

Once the file has been downloaded copy it to your FTP server. Now it’s time to apply the patch. log onto UCS Director via either the console or SSH using the shelladmin account. Select option 3 to stop all the services.

How To: Cisco UCS Director – 5.3 to 5.4 Upgrade

February 11, 2016 by derek.hennessy Posted in Cisco, How-To, UCS Tagged Cisco, Cisco Champion, Cisco UCS Director, UCSD, UCSD upgrade Leave a comment

Cisco announced their release of UCS Director 5.4 back in November. As I’m currently running 5.3 and ran into an issue with a workflow Cisco support recommended upgrading to 5.4. I had a look over the Cisco UCS Director 5.4 Release Notes and there’s a new version of Java and the CentOS operating system are newer in the latest version. Due to this the upgrade procedure for 5.4 is different from previous version. In earlier versions it was possible to upload a patch via shelladmin and it would upgrade the software and database schema in place. 5.4 however requires new appliances to be deployed and a migration of database files etc. to be done between the 5.3 and 5.4 versions.

I really think that Cisco needs to look at using a HTML 5 console in the future as this upgrade path is overly complicated. Considering a lot of companies want you to be on the latest version when opening support calls, including Cisco, it would make sense for them to make it easier to perform the required upgrades.

The primary changes that have caused the modification to the upgrade path are:

CentOS version 5.4 to version 6.6
Java version 1.6 to version 1.8

Another thing to note is that version 5.54 requires 12GB RAM.

Cisco recommend standing up the new appliances beside your current UCS Director and Bare-Metal Appliances and performing a migration. In my case there’s a few firewall rule etc already been created for the existing environment so I wanted to keep the same IP addresses and machine names. I changed the IP addresses of the current appliances to be something else within the same subnet and gave the new appliances temporary names but the existing IP addresses. Once everything had been migrated and the changes confirmed I was able to rename the appliances to be the existing ones and removed the older appliances from the infrastructure. Before commencing the upgrade I also had a sold read over the UCS Director Upgrade 5.4 Guide and the UCS Director Bare-Metal Agent 5.4 Upgrade Guide

The 2016 Hit List

February 9, 2016 by derek.hennessy Posted in Blog Tagged Blog, Career skills, Community, Goals Leave a comment

Scott Lowe, who is a well know IT contributor, recently released a post about his 2016 Projects. While I don’t have any intention of writing a book this year his post did get me thinking about what I’d like to work on this year and what goals I want to aim for. Truth be told it’s been something that I’ve been thinking about since the Xmas period but I’ve been having a bit of a writers block for the past month so I’ve only gotten around to this now.

So here they are, the goals I’m making myself accountable to for the next 11 months.

1. Blog more

Last year was my first real attempt to blog regularly and I have to admit that it was sometimes hard to find the time to write down all the blog ideas I have in my head. In total I published 56 blog posts on virtualnotions which is actually more than I had expected at roughly 1 a week. This year I want to build on the foundation of last year and work at releasing more content. One thing I really want to ensure is the quality remains high. I was a bit surprised by the buzz I got from posting some new content and seeing the readership rise for various posts. The site traffic jumped around March of last year and steadily grew for the remainder of the year. The number of visitors isn’t going to break any blog records but it’s been satisfying watch it grow and has provided encouragement to keep going.

2. Get back on the certification trail

During the past couple of years I’ve let this aspect of my career drop a bit. This is largely down to motivation and starting a family. Having kids, as I’m sure many are well aware, really destroys the free time that existed before kids. Now that they are growing and most importantly healthy, I want to put some focus back on certifications. I know for many certifications are seen to be unnecessary but I’m using them as learning tools. I’ve expanded my knowledge over the past few years into different technology and the key certs I will work on will be to further expand and solidify my knowledge in those areas. The ones I’ll be working towards are CCNA DC, NetApp NCDA and re-certify for VMware VCP. I want to also start working towards VMware VCAP-6 which I want to complete next year. All of these certs are big undertakings but once I get into the study zone it should hopefully make it easier to complete a few of them in succession.

3. Community participation Read More

Cisco Champion 2016

February 8, 2016 by derek.hennessy Posted in Champion, Cisco Tagged Cisco, Cisco Champion, Community Leave a comment

Last Saturday I awoke to find an email from Cisco Champions Program welcoming me into the Cisco Champions community for 2016. I feel humbled, honoured and excited to be selected to be part of this community. This is my first time being nominated as a Cisco Champion and for me personally it shows that I’m progressing in the direction I wished in my career.

When I began this blog a couple of years ago mainly as a drop zone for documenting technical issues I ran into I couldn’t have dreamed that I would have ended up making a contribution to the greater IT community.

For 2016 I want to continue my level of participation in the community via this blog and hopefully expand to participating in podcasts. On a local level I want to contribute more in the virtualization, data center and automation communities. And from a personal level I want to interact with the other Cisco Champions and expand my knowledge of Cisco solutions and services.

Well done to all the other Cisco Champions, particularly the other novices. It’s going to be a blast. I’m looking forward to attend CLMEL later this year as a Cisco Champion.

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