I’m sitting here doing some work on VMware view listening to Historical Apollo 16 Audio recordings. These guys communicate quite well. It’s amazing how professional and well these guys communicate.

John Watts Young (johnny) and Charles Moss Duke, Jr. (charlie) have been working on the surface of the moon for the last hour. Drilling holes, fixing air hoses, taking pictures, etc. The culture of my world is different from these guys. I’ll make a conscisous effort to be more like these guys in the future. Even Houston is impressive. They are blunt when they need to be, passive at the right times, and generally able to show the excitement of standing on the moon.

Hah, “sound doesn’t travel too good in a vacuum but it jumped”, they are taking some pictures.

Soma.fm is an online radio station that I use sometimes. One of the streams is Mission Control audio. I’m here in my chair living this event for the first time along with some ambient chillout style music. You see, I was not even born when these guys were making history. Some 238,000 miles from earth and 9 years before I was born. I’m sure they never thought anyone would be listening to this in their homes 29 years later.

Mr. Young & Mr. Duke, I really appreciate all you have done for the space program. I hope you are both enjoying retirement. I am enjoying listening to the fine job you guys did. Would love to meet you if you are ever in Houston.

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If you run your TSM on AIX read on…

Tape drives need to be changed out from time to time. The process can get tricky if you don’t remember the steps. I’ll give them to you in a bit and you can always reference this page when you need to perform this action again. This is test on AIX 5.3 and Tivoli 5.5.

Step 1. Log into TSM and determine which drive you need to change. You can use query drive, show library and query path f=d to get this information. Lets assume it is a drive named “DRIVE00″ and that its path is /dev/rmt0.
Step 2. Delete the path definition in TSM for the Drive. An example command would be “del path server1 drive00 srct=server destt=drive library0. You can run a help delete path. Remember the settings because we can use them later.
Step 3. Delete the drive definition in TSM. An example command would be “del drive

rmdev -dl lb0
rmdev -dl rmt1
rmdev -dl rmt2
rmdev -dl rmt3
Smit, Devices, Tivoli, Discover Supported Devices, Both fscsi adapters. This gives us lb’s and mt’s. We do not want mt’s.
rmdev -dl mt0
rmdev -dl mt1
rmdev -dl mt2

run cfgmgr in aix to get the rmt’s back.

delete path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE00 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DR LIBR=ML6020
delete path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE01 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DR LIBR=ML6020
delete path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE02 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DR LIBR=ML6020
delete path ZPHBACKUP01 ML6020 SRCT=SERV DESTT=LIBR

delete drive ML6020 DRIVE00
delete drive ML6020 DRIVE01
delete drive ML6020 DRIVE02

stop/start tivoli storage manager

define path ZPHBACKUP01 ML6020 SRCT=SERV DESTT=LIBR DEVI=/dev/lb0

def drive ML6020 DRIVE00
def drive ML6020 DRIVE01
def drive ML6020 DRIVE02

define path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE00 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DRIVE LIBR=ML6020 DEVI=/dev/rmt0
define path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE01 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DRIVE LIBR=ML6020 DEVI=/dev/rmt1
define path ZPHBACKUP01 DRIVE02 SRCT=SERV DESTT=DRIVE LIBR=ML6020 DEVI=/dev/rmt2

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1) From TSM:
Save the output from the device queries, and save the current device configuration (the filename is optional):

query library
query drive f=d
query path f=d
query devclass f=d
backup devconfig [ filename=devconfig.bak ]

2) From AIX:
List the tape devices:

lsdev -Cc tape

Remove the drive and library device names:

rmdev -dl

For example, if the drive device name is /dev/rmt1:

rmdev -dl rmt1

3) Upgrade Atape
Ftp the Atape driver in binary mode from ftp://index.storsys.ibm.com/devdrvr/AIX or ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/storage/devdrvr/AIX

Remove the older Atape driver (optional):

installp -u Atape.driver

Install and commit the Atape driver. For example, if you downloaded the file to /tmp/Atape.12.0.8.0.bin:

installp -acXd /tmp/Atape.12.0.8.0.bin all

Configure the tape device:

cfgmgr -v

(-v is not required but will show where it hangs if it does)

Verify the new devices are Available:

lsdev -Cc tape

(Note: While not always absolutely necessary, it is strongly recommended to reboot the system after upgrading the Atape.driver)

4) From TSM:
While it is recommended to remove and redefine the paths after any hardware change, including upgrading Atape.driver, sometimes it is not necessary to do anything else after upgrading Atape. If the activity log reports I/O errors for the library or drives, sometimes it is only necessary to force the TSM server to communicate with the drives to resolve them:

update path srctype=server desttype=drive library= device= online=yes

If this does not resolve the I/O errors, then continue with steps 5-7.

5) Delete the drive and library paths
For each drive:

delete path srctype=server desttype=drive library=

For the library:

delete path srctype=server desttype=library

6) Redefine the drive and library paths

define path srctype=server desttype=library device=/dev/ online=yes
define path srctype=server desttype=library library= devicename=/dev/ online=yes

(Use the devconfig file as a guide for the definitions.)

References:
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for AIX Administrator’s Reference
Atape device driver README ftp://index.storsys.ibm.com/devdrvr/AIX/README

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I found an interesting event that they put on every year for the past few years called Citizens Fire Academy. This was right up my alley. I was a citizen of Jersey Village and I had some interest in what the “firefighters” were all about. I remember thinking, who are these firefighters? What do they do when they are not fighting fires? What is fighting a fire anyway, spraying water?

Citizens fire academy lasted about 3 months, every Thursday night and two Saturdays. This turned out to be one of the most interesting things I have done in the past few years. I learned more about the fire service than I even knew existed. I was certified by the red cross in CPR and First Aid by the second class. The fire science classes were the deal sealer for me. I was fascinated. I’ll admit I was quite the firebug as a kid. I made my own fireworks and firecrackers. I realized in one of the fire science classes that I still had the fascination of fire in me. What had changed was that I was getting the proper education in a safe and controlled (as much as possible , it is fire) environment. The instructor performed live fire experiments and demonstrations, that simply proved what was myth and what was fact.

About a month into the Citizens fire academy, a ~400 hour cadet class started. Joining the fire service as a volunteer and completing the training would turn me into a real firefighter, albeit a newbie. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I started in late January, “First Responder” training with Cy-Fair. First Responder is the medical portion of training that is required by Cy-Fair. After finishing this section of the training, I felt more comfortable knowing the information. Skills like back boarding, c-spine stabilization, splinting, CPR, and recognizing common medical issues are important and were well taught. During this time I was still attending Citizens fire academy, absorbing as much knowledge as I could.

Over the next 5 months I endured and survived some of the most fun, exciting, and difficult training I have been through. The best summary, “15 minutes of work fully packed up is equal to 2 hours of cardio”. I heard a Houston firefighter say that, I won’t even fact check it because I was ready to collapse after 27 minutes of work fully packed up. I actually got to do this during consumption test which was to find out how long we last on a 30 minute air bottle. We did so many things like ladders, hoses, live burns, ventilation, air duct mazes, ropes, tools, and SCBA to name a few.

We were quickly broken up into teams and my team was like fire family. Jim, Brendon, Eric, and myself made up Team 5. We looked out for each other, checking gear, repeating instructions, you name it. This was very important because quite honestly our lives depended on it. The fire didn’t care that we were just cadets.

Cadet Class 42 Team 5

We all survived the training and graduated in June. I’ve uploaded all of the photos and videos that were taken throughout our training here. Cadet Class 42 Firefighter Gallery

Here are a few to get you started….

Grass Fire Training

Working with zero visibility

2.5 inch charged line being carried into burn building.

Real fire and real heat.

Cadet Class 42

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Below is a javascript player if you would like to hear some audio.

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Cisco’s 3 wheel car. Looks awesome. Sitting in Mandalay Bar at Cisco Live Networkers 2010.

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NINJA!

The Lancope NetFlow ninja’s almost got the jump on me.

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EMC World 2010 is coming to an end. I am in my last session here and finally have some time to update you all on what I have seen. Really it is what everyone has seen as it was announced here. The star of the show, VPlex. This allows for active/active storage using synchronous distances.

The theme this year is “The Journey to the Private Cloud”. My company started this journey years ago so it’s nice to get a conference dedicated to what we have been working to accomplish for years. We have been looking for some technology to allow us to “flip the switch”. We want our workloads to be mobile and unbolted from the physical machines. This process started with VMware many years ago. As we close in on 95% of the workloads virtualized the next task is to unbolt the workload from the data center.

Now moving a workload from a data center has been possible for a while. However moving that workload back has been tricky. The main factor is time and effort. You could restore a work load and then update clients to point towards it. Then you had to do the same to go back. VMware SRM made this a little easier but it isn’t quite “flip the switch”.

Flipping the switch is an action. We want this to be a repeatable action. We want the effort reduce to a minimum as well as the time. Days and Weeks is not good enough for us to be able to move a workload. Hours is better but still not what we are looking for. We want minutes and seconds. We also do not want the workload to be halted when we “flip the switch”. This meant a few things had to exist that just were not possible until recently. You needed uninterrupted network access to the workload. You also needed writable access to the data in all locations. You then need the workload to move between physical computing devices without interruption.

Moving a workload between physical computing devices is possible with vMotion when using VMware. This has been in existence for many years but only inside of a data center.

Cisco has solved the issue of uninterrupted network access to the workload with Nexus. A new paid for feature for Nexus 7K’s called Overlay Transport Virtualization. OTV allows for stretching a vlan but stops all of the bad stuff your network people will tell you about doing this. The IP of the vm now does not have to change even though it is running in a data center that is 100km away from where it was.

EMC has solved the uninterrupted access to storage, both reading and writing. Active/Active access to storage with disks that are separated by 100km. VPlex allows for synchronous access to both storage arrays while presenting a single LUN to the vSphere host.

You then simply vMotion the VM and no one is the wiser. This is all brand new technology and information is trickling out about it. The next year or so will be very interesting with this new capability. EMC has said they are working on increasing to asynchronous distances which will open up a new world to mobile workloads.

Very interesting indeed.

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EMC has a long track record of providing excellent tools to manage their products. Navicli is an example of a product that is included with your Clariion. EMC maintains up to date versions for any platform you can imagine, aix, linux, hpux, windows, vmware, etc. This tool allows you to perform many commands on your Clariion platform. EMC released some new technology called F.A.S.T which stands for Fully Automated Storage Tiering. This is really a bundle of 3 tools and is called F.A.S.T. V1.

The 3 tools are Navi Analyzer, Navisphere QoS, and Fast LUN Migrator. Let’s think about this for a bit. Everyone should already have Navi Analyzer. I always purchase it for my arrays. I also already own QoS. Now I am forced to buy them again to get the new tool Fast LUN Migrator. The reason for this? FLM requires .nar files to work! It cannot function with .naz files which you can always generate without Navi Analyzer. Rather than release the ability for you to analyzer .naz files with their tool and restrict you from actually opening them with an analyzer interface they force you to buy navi analyzer. I have yet to see why you actually need QoS as it is not used by Analyzer or FLM. It appears this is just an extra. The price for the suite you ask? You could buy a giant nexus one phone instead.

The installation of FLM is only 64MB, almost 1$ per byte. None of this is adding up to value for me yet. Let’s look at what FLM actually does for us. We already know what Analyzer and QoS brings to the table, the mystery is this new tool that we have to pay so much for.

FLM is a command line tool for windows. Here is how it works.
1. You download a nar file from your array.
2. You run fastlunmigrator.exe lunanalyze narfile.nar
3. You open a csv file and type in destination raid groups for the luns that are recommended to move.
4. You run fastlunmigrator.exe lunassist -h ipaddr -user adminuser -password adminpass -scope 0 -file narfileout.csv
5. You wait for the lun to migrate to the destination raid group. You can check status with fastlunmigrator.exe -status -h ipaddr -user adminuser -password adminpass -scope 0
6. Once it says complete for step 5 above, you are done.

Now what actually happened in step 1. Well you used analyzer to get the nar file if you did not own analyzer you would get a naz file. In step 2 the FLM product looked for luns with over 70% utilization or an average busy queue length of greater than 5 or a response time over 30 ms. If it finds one then it reports in the csv that it needs to move to faster disk type. In step 3 you MANUALLY choose raid groups and type them into the csv so that FLM knows where to move the source lun to. In step 4 FLM is creating a new lun of the proper size in the destination raid group, this is the destination lun. It then does a lun migration to this lun from the source lun. Step 5 is just a textual report of migration summary.

Now all of this can simply be scripted. Many shops may already even have this scripted. This Fast LUN Migrator tool should be free. The real power is analyzer. It is the one that is providing all of the data. Everything else can be done in Clariion manually. In fact you would likely do lun migrations one at a time anyways. Could you imagine if NaviCLI was a paid for product?

Now EMC has announced that F.A.S.T. v2 is coming out. This is sub lun tiering and sounds very interesting. There are some articles on the internet that mention EMC may be behind the curve here since some of their competition already have very similar features. F.A.S.T v2 and Flash Cache will be two emerging paid for features for Clariion to keep an eye on. Oh did I mention F.A.S.T. v2 is not an upgrade to F.A.S.T. in the sense you get it with your maintenance. No, F.A.S.T. v2 is a PAID for in addition to F.A.S.T. v1. They are going to hit you twice, that’s right folks.

EMC,
You have made a mistake here in charging for Fast LUN Migrator. This product should be free. I wasn’t overly surprised you charged for it at first because I thought it did more. At first I thought it would be sub $10,000. To find it is almost 6 times that list price is shocking. I keep looking for what you think is worth so much and I do plan to investigate more. Charge for F.A.S.T. v2 not v1.

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I’m curiously considering referring to Cisco as a data center company not a networking company.

I really do like the VCE combination. I’ve been running VMware and EMC in my data center for 5 years. After spending many weeks researching Cisco UCS and their competition I’m happy to add Cisco to the mix. So far everything they have designed into the solution makes perfect sense. The palo adapter has been the solution to many problems I have white boarded. The further I get into UCS the more I like it.

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