Piszki Lab | EN

My case study in the clouds…

2016/01/31
by Piotr Pisz
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My first EMC Elect achievement unlocked.

The 2016 EMC Elect were announced today and  I am very proud to have been included in this group amongst 71 other IT professionals. I was waiting for this information forward and I will not hide that for me is a big thing. Although it is not official certification, its “only” community award from people that operates in an EMC environment. I have to admit that the path of development, vision, strategy  and EMC products generally very me “lie” and with great pleasure I crunching their solutions. In my opinion, EMC is a decisive leader when it comes to solutions for storage and cloud (very often you can read on the Internet that a other company released ANSWER for the EMC product . It should be up to date with the EMC/Dell company and keep track of her ideas, I in any case I’m not going to let go and you can expect many more entries on this blog devoted to the EMC.

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Ah, well, one more thing, I checked the list and it looks like I’m the first man from Poland who won the EMC Elect award!

2015/12/22
by Piotr Pisz
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EMC Avamar – Backup EMC Celerra (VNX Unified) via NDMP

Using in our environment EMC Celerra (NAS) and CIFS/NFS shares, sooner or later you will need to backup data held there. Such solutions can be archived using the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP). The author of this protocol is NetApp, after a series of purchases its owner became EMC, however this protocol is available to all and now use it all the companies involved in archiving. We’ll meet him at IBM Tivoli, EMC Avamar, EMC NetWorker, Symantec NetBackup, Exec, and many others and in the open source like Bacula and Amanda. Described by me below configuration is based on Avamar Server 6.1 (Virtual) and VNX for File 7.1. The configuration for Avamar Server 7 and VNX for File 8.1 is exactly the same, EMC Avamar 7 additionally supports the EMC Isilon backup via NDMP. Topology of the entire solution is the case:

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2015/12/16
by Piotr Pisz
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PernixData Architect – Analysis and prediction of storage.

Not so long ago I described the installation of PernixData FVP 3.0 (Freedom Edition) and now we have a new version 3.1 that has been enhanced with a solution called PernixData Architect 1.0. What is an Architect? It is a solution that deepens the possibility of FVP in insight all disk operations in our virtual environment. Add to that the full analytics in real time and the ability to predict the behavior of our environment in the future. In addition acceleration resource management made more flexible through the  recommendations mechanism. We no longer rigidly selected all machines, now Architect will show you the machine which are worth to write accelerate. As a result, we increase the efficiency of the whole environment at a lower cost. What Architect is different from Storage Analytics in vRealize Operations Manager? It gives us a much more complete information and the ability to respond more quickly to what is happening in the storage environment.

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2015/12/09
by Piotr Pisz
3 Comments

EMC vVNX – Testing VVOL in vSphere 6 – Part two.

In the first part we installed and configured the EMC vVNX VVOL Technology Prewiew, now we will continue this process. At the beginning a few words about theories. VMware VVOL brings a lot of changes in the configuration of storage in a vSphere environment. Lun concept disappears and is introduced a new layer between the disk array and the vSphere. New logic that the premise is to simplify the whole management model. The Storage Administrator configures disk array container containing VVOL datastore with specific capabilities (thin, deduplication, etc.) and using Protocol Endpoint, connects the Storage Container with ESXi hosts. vSphere Administrator create Storage Policies through which composes proper “datastore”. The quotes are in place, VVOL is the implementation of the VMware Sofware Defined Storage concept where everything is defined by policies and where are disappearing rigid connections. It seems bizarre but I assure you that every Administrator very quickly in this find. Here you can read much more about VVOL benefits.

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2015/11/27
by Piotr Pisz
5 Comments

EMC vVNX – Testing VVOL in vSphere 6 – Part one.

One of the many novelties that appeared in vSphere 6.0 is a Virtual Volumes (VVols). In a nutshell, this is a service aimed at handling disk operations such as snapshot of a single virtual machine and move them upstairs, at the level of the disk array (VMDK file is the native storage format). This allows us to virtualize critical, highly loaded database and back up it freely without affecting its performance (we all know what it looks like in the case of a traditional snapshot and delta file). Detail on VVols I wrote in the second part based on the shown examples. In this section we will install EMC vVNX Vvol Technical Preview which is the currently one solution allows you to check how it all works (in addition free).

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2015/11/10
by Piotr Pisz
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vCSA 6 and Synology – Auto Deploy in a home lab.

When you have at home lab at least two ESXi hosts, you should be tempted to configure and launch vSphere Auto Deploy service. Thanks to it we will not have to run ESXi from internal drives or memory sticks. The requirement of two hosts came from the fact that we always need to have an active vCenter Server (but if you run the vCenter instance within the Qnap NAS in the Virtual Station we can limit to one ESXi host). This technology can also be used to run nested ESXi inside a single host. In this post I will discuss the preparation of a custom ESXi image (for the White Box server), configure vCenter Server Appliance 6 and Synology NAS for Auto Deploy and prepare hosts profiles for the ESXi.

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