EMC SRA for VNX with VDM Replication error fix

Just a quick post on a problem I had this week at a customer site running VMware Site Recovery Manager 5 with EMC Celerra and VNX mix. I actually had everything up and running for a couple of weeks before I logged in again to notice in the “Array Manager” section, both arrays showed status [...]

vSphere 5.0 Licensing Causes Frenzy

This week I’ve been in Sydney Australia doing EMC Recoverpoint training and its seems there have been two big things happen while I’ve been here. Firstly vSphere 5.0 has been released, I opened my email Monday morning to find a tone of marketing emails from VMware about the launch. Secondly, it seems Lady GaGa is in Sydney at [...]

New support for VNX/VNXe Storage Arrays

When it comes to VMware integration, two of my favorite pieces of software now support the new EMC VNX/VNXe product range. The first link below is to one of Chad’s latest posts covering the latest release of the VMware vCenter plugin. The second link goes to PowerLink where you can read more on the new features [...]

VMware SRM with CLARIION SRA Gotcha

I was working on a VMware SRM with EMC CLARIION implementation when I come across another gotcha and thought id post about it. I had to change the IP Address’s for the CLARIION management ports at the DR site and with doing so I went into SRM and edited the array manager configuration so the DR array information used the new management [...]

EMC NetWorker Support for vStorage API for Data Protection

Working for an EMC Partner and being involved in Beta testing means I have to be careful not to blog about anything which could violate the Non Disclosure Agreement we sign as part of the Beta program. Considering the following information can be found in the NetWorker Community forums, I can say the following; NetWorker 7.6 SP2 [...]

Replication Manager 5.3 brings support for NFS on Windows VMware Proxy

Since Celerra NFS datastores have become supported by both Replication Manager and VMware Site Recovery Manager, I’ve been migrating Celerra customers off iSCSI to NFS mainly because of the overhead needed to facilitate Snapshots/Replication of iSCSI luns. In versions prior to 5.3 you needed to have a Linux host configured as the VMware Proxy to allow snapshots of NFS datastores, but the [...]

EMC NetWorker Virtualization Map Stops Working With vCenter 4.1 Upgrade

Ive come across the same problem at a number of customer sites recently, so I thought this might be something worth posting about. The problem typically comes about as customers who’ve traditionally had vCenter running on a 32bit Operating System, now move to a x64bit Operating System to support vCenter 4.1 which enforces x64 bit architecture. Now the actual [...]

Avamar backup fails after Virtual Machine restore

Here’s the scenario, Using the Avamar management console, Add a Virtual Machine to the “Default Virtual Machine Group” Perform a Backup of the Virtual Machine Delete Virtual Machine using VI Client Perform a Virtual Machine Recovery back into Virtual Infrastructure Power Virtual Machine On Perform a Backup of the recovered Virtual Machine I manually initiated [...]

iSCSI or NFS with EMC Celerra ?

There has always been a lot of debate in the VMware community about which IP storage protocol performs best and to be honest I’ve never had the time to do any real comparisons on the EMC Celerra, but recently I stumbled across a great post by Jason Boche comparing the performance of NFS and iSCSI storage using the Celerra NS120, you can [...]

ESX4i Still No Boot From SAN Support

Over the years I have  always recommended the full ESX install over the ESXi build for a number of reasons, heres a couple of the better technical ones. Scripted Installs Boot from SAN Support Web Access Jumbo frames supported on VMKernel Interfaces We have all known for sometime now that VMware plan on converging the two ESX architectures, [...]