May 17

Here is an easy way to find your trespassed lun’s on Clariion.

naviseccli -h 10.1.1.161 -getlun trespass

The output is as follows on my test array:
LOGICAL UNIT NUMBER 37
Default Owner: SP A
Current owner: SP B

LOGICAL UNIT NUMBER 25
Default Owner: SP B
Current owner: SP A

You can use this command to trespass a single lun.

naviseccli -h 10.1.1.161 trespass lun 37

This will return you to the command prompt when finished. So run the getlun command again to see if the lun is still trespassed.

If you have a lot of luns to trespass you can use the following command on both storage processor ip’s

naviseccli -h 10.1.1.161 trespass mine
naviseccli -h 10.1.1.162 trespass mine

May 13

EMC World has ended and I am on a plane thinking about Ionix UIM. This is a product that appears to be geared towards configuration of vBlock. I’m interested in answering some questions for myself. I am curious if I can automate the provisioning of new blades as they arrive at my location. I am also interested in automating the provisioning of new chassis as they are plugged into my UCS fabric interconnects.i am interested in automating the full provisioning and configuration of ESXi. Tis could help me move a long the path of getting out of the server provisioning business.

Currently provisioning a new blade is extremely easy with UCS. I said easy not instant, fast, or man power free. Unpack and slide in sounds great and not worrying after this point sounds great. Minutes to a couple of hours later have VM’s start vMotioning to it would be awesome.

Today we have to log into UCS and assign a service profile. Then we zone it in the brocade switches and assign a boot LUN in unisphere. Now we boot it and mount an iso to install ESXi. Then we add the rest of the storage to it that is our normal datastores. Assign a host profile that never seems to be perfect and configure the network. Near this point some final tweaks and we have VM’s on it. A process that seems to take us a couple of days at best.

I do not think UIM is going to support brocade but it might. In he help file I saw only mention of MDS. I bet it does support nexus though. I’ll get this questions answered soon enough. The lab the product seem simple from a functionality point of view but it did meet a key piece of strategy to remove manual process and replace with automation. It also appeared to fill a gap in physical capacity reporting in a single pane though not as good as I want. I would love to see integration with capacity iq to show true capacity including virtual capacity.

All in all UIM is something I plan to look at further.

May 10


I just completed a vLab on Greenplum. Interesting technology, a purpose build appliance around a database engine. Appears to be mostly for data warehouse type storage with large databases that you cannot supply the performance for today using your current methods.

The demo I saw on Monday referenced a use case at Amazon where 16 billion rows needed to be sliced and diced providing useful data to marketing and executives. For instance you could look at all purchases for the past 5 years where someone bought a DVD player and then did not buy any dvd’s in the last 12 months. Then send them an email with some DVD sales or some other DVD related marketing. The wow factor? The results came back in less than a second. The special sauce? 768 GB of cache.

The box is currently sold in 1/4, 1/2, and whole cabinet configurations. It does support some nice features which I will continue to investigate and see if the technology can apply to the challenges my company experiences.

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