I recently installed a new Data Domain DD6300. Part of the whole installation procedure is to run a DD OS upgrade to bring the system up to the target DD OS release. You can find the target releases over here. While running the upgrade to 6.1.2.20, the Data Domain correctly rebooted as part of the upgrade. Logging back in, the system GUI kept throwing an “Upgrade in progress” popup, blocking everything else in view. There is also an alert that shows “DD OS Upgrade is in progress. The system will not be available for backup and restore operations. The alert will be cleared after the upgrade operation is complete.” Which I guess is NEVER when the upgrade is hung…
GUI
The Dell EMC High-End Systems Division talked about two systems. First about the VMAX All Flash, and later about the XtremIO X2. This post is about the latter one. The XtremIO X2 builds upon the foundation of the original “old” XtremIO, but also does a couple of things differently. This post will explore those difference a bit, and will also talk about asynchronous and synchronous replication.
When deleting an Isilon folder, you might come across some peculiar behavior. When browsing with a file explorer to an SMB share and deleting a folder, the operation apparently succeeds and the folder disappears. When refreshing the share however, the folder is back. Resorting to an SSH session to delete the folder, you get an Operation not permitted error and the rm/rmdir command fails.
After you’ve built a new storage environment you will probably want to monitor it and/or integrate the equipment in existing monitoring tools. SNMP is one of the protocols to use for this, but for some reason I always forget how to do a Cisco NX-OS SNMP v3 configuration. There’s a big difference in security between SNMP v2c and v3 and they’re configured quite differently: SNMPv2c uses community strings, SNMPv3 builds on the user accounts in the switch. This post will show you how to configure SNMP v3 in the DCNM SAN GUI and on the Cisco MDS NX-OS CLI.
Cisco Smart Zoning greatly reduces the time needed to zone servers to storage on Cisco NX-OS SAN switches. Instead of creating numerous zones that contain one single initiator and one single target, you can now classify a WWN as initiator, target or both and throw them all into one single zone. The switch then figures out which devices should be allowed to talk with each other (based on the parameter you set for each WWN). Not only does this speed up the entire zoning process but it also helps keep the zoning interface uncluttered and minimize the risk for errors. Let’s see how you can configure this in the DCNM-SAN GUI…