Byte sized for when a nibble just isn't enough!
If you’re like me and you have a number of debugging tools (WinDBG, Sysinternals tools, etc) you more than likely have a locally cached copy of the publicly available symbols. This certainly helps speed things up as you don’t have to query the online Microsoft repository every time you use one of these tools, however … Read more
I still remember being impressed with the design and architecture of the HPE 3PAR storage system all those years ago when going through a tender process for a replacement SAN. Over time new versions of the hardware and software have been released and again I’ve been impressed and excited to see the new possibilities. I … Read more
Well this is an interesting and unexpected announcement – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are to purchase Nimble storage. This is in addition to the recent acquisition of Simplivity which is a player in the hyperconverged market. We already have 3PAR storage arrays at various price points with the current 8200 as the entry level with … Read more
I set a colleague of mine the task of updating our Nexsan storage devices with randomly generated administrator passwords as part of our regular security review. For whatever reason one of the Nexsan SATABeast units decided on next logon that it didn’t like the new password we had set, nor would it accept the old … Read more
I’m currently working on a case with HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) 3PAR support with regard to excessive retransmit errors on our Remote Copy Fibre Channel (RCFC) connection between two 7400 arrays. While troubleshooting we found that a required option was not set appropriately – namely interrupt coalescing on the RCFC ports. In this post I … Read more
This week I came across an interesting problem on one of our Microsoft Failover Clusters (FOC) which utilises the HPE Cluster Extensions (CLX) software to provide failover support with our HPE 3PAR arrays. A couple of roles within one FOC showed the CLX resource as failed with everything else still showing as online. We were … Read more
I recently learned of a feature which had previously been unknown to me – Microsoft Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) caching. I use both Hyper-V and VMware at work though typically I focus on VMware as that is where the majority of our environment runs. I am deploying more systems to Hyper-V every day and the … Read more
In this post we will look at deploying the HP 3PAR quorum witness – this is a vital system when running arrays with Peer Persistence synchronous replication as it allows us to arbitrate in a split brain scenario. First off what does it do and why do we care? The quorum witness is a virtual … Read more
I recently came across a few blade servers which, for whatever reason did not have their HP Smart Array controller configured for caching. These particular servers are HP StoreEasy blades with a Smart Array P220i controller. I’ll quickly run through the steps carried out to configure the Smart Array cache. Configuration I logged onto the … Read more
Today I deployed the 3PAR Vision monitoring software from http://www.3parvision.com/ A free trial is available and the company sent me a Tweet with details and I decided to give it a shot and provide some feedback to those of you reading this site and the company itself. Installer Requirements .NET Framework 4.5 is installed on … Read more