Today I visited a customer to connect two RecoverPoint clusters. One RecoverPoint cluster is connected to a Unity array, the other to a VNX. After installing both clusters, we ran the RecoverPoint Connect Cluster wizard and were greeted with an “Internal Error. Contact support” error message. Awesome! Fortunately it turned out to be a pretty basic error which was easy to fix. A short story about RecoverPoint installation types in mixed-array configurations…
VNX
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Troubleshooting any system requires information about the configuration of the system and how it’s behaving over time. Unsurprisingly, this is also valid when you’re troubleshooting performance on a Dell EMC VNX. So help your storage engineer, and enable performance data logging on the VNX!
We’re in the midst of a VCE vBlock 340 software upgrade. Part of this upgrade process is upgrading the Cisco Nexus 5K switches that connect the blades and storage to the customer network. After upgrading the switch we suddenly noticed on the switch that the VNX Unified standby data mover (server_3) interface suspended with a “no LACP PDUs” error message. A quick check on the switch that wasn’t upgraded yet showed that interface to be online. So what’s up with that?
A VNX Unified upgrade is fairly easy: Unisphere Service Manager (USM) does most of the heavy lifting. A Block only system is the simplest of all: you upload a .ndu software package to the system and wait for the update to complete.
A Unified system is a combined package of a VNX Block system, and a File component consisting of one or two Control Stations and at least 2 datamover blades. In a VNX Unified upgrade, you first need to upgrade the File part of the system and afterwards the Block part. For the File upgrade, you need to select an .upg package. But… you can’t download this from the EMC/VCE website. Now what?
Today EMC announced their new and improved mid-range storage at EMCWorld: say hello to Unity! It will be replacing the VNX1 and VNX2 systems with simple, modern flexible and affordable new platform and can be purchased in either an all-flash or hybrid configuration. There are quite a lot of differences between both the new Unity and the old VNX systems, with a number of improvements (available at GA or later) that make me really, really happy. Let’s dive in!