A quick heads-up this time about building your own lab environment
Sometimes you just want to run a VNX, Avamar, PowerPath, Data Domain or Isilon as a virtual machine to see how things work, or to write work instructions. And EMC offers a lot of these virtual appliances for free!
Take a look at these:
It’s been a while since the VNX2 was born: September 2013, I remember it very well. Being a part of the EMC Elect, I was invited to be at the actual launch in Milan (Italy) and what a ride it was! The whole launch was wrapped around Formula 1 technology and it sure was “speed 2 lead“. That “old” VNX2, which I’m still perfectly happy with by the way, was a revolution in my humble opinion: multi-core everything, in short MCx. And yes, it was like everything just went faster, smoother and better.
But with new technologies popping up every so many months now, it was time for a new mid-range storage array. Flash storage isn’t a novelty anymore, it’s a must! And the “old” hybrid arrays were fine, but needed some fine-tuning. With flash devices growing bigger every quarter or half a year and faster as well, the whole back-end needed an upgrade. The old 6 Gb back-end (x4) needed an upgrade.
The XtremIO GUI looks very slick and it has this chronometer with IOps and MBps and everything, but when you need to have MiTrend analyze the statistics, the questions comes to mind: what statistics, what files?
First log on to the XtremIO GUI. Then click on the administration button
Now click on the “CLI Terminal TAB” and type:
create-debug-info
Java, it’s a curse. And now you suddenly need to upload the spcollect files to EMC and Java isn’t installed or incompatible and Unisphere won’t start.
Make sure you have NAVISECCLI installed and just do it from the CLI!
When using enhanced device aliases, make sure you enable this on the new switch as well:
device-alias mode enhanced
device-alias commit
You can verify if this is enabled on an existing switch by this command:
sh run | grep “device-alias mode”
EMC Elect 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and
Dell EMC Elect 2017
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