Dell

If you’ve been reading my other posts of late, you will have gathered I’ve been building a new lab. I say “new”, the last one was a single R710 with a ReadyNas Ultra 6 attached. So essentially, this is my first REAL lab. It’s mostly based on Dell hardware; it’s cheap on eBay, I like their management tools and in the past i’ve only really had good experiences with them, granted it’s no Cisco UCS, HP Bladesystem or Dell M1000e - I think with the addition of OpenManage, and in particular OMIVV it makes it almost as manageable as those environments when you get the foundations laid down nice and solid....

I have recently been rebuilding my home lab from scratch (a series of posts on that coming soon), so naturally my first port of call for server hardware was eBay, what self-respecting techie would pay full price for anything… I found an incredible deal on some used Dell R710 servers, so I bought two to bring my collection of these beasts up to 3 so I can run VSAN, NSX, vCloud Director and some other SDDC ↗ tastiness (VMware VIO ↗ anyone?...

One of the things that the Dell MD Storage Manager is a progress indicator for rebuild operations or any actions at all really, it’s fairly simple to do, but you have to use the command line tool SMcli.exe that comes with MD Storage Manager. First navigate to: C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\MD Storage Software\MD Storage Manager\client Then execute: SMcli.exe {your.san.ip.address} -p {password} -c "show virtualDisk [\"name-of-vdisk\"] actionProgress;" Obviously replace the curly braces with appropriate values - as well as the "name-of-vdisk" the square brackets are part of the syntax....

I have had the need recently to expand a LUN on a Dell MD3000i SAN to above 2TB that is presented to VMWare ESX 5.1 hosts. There are a few caveats here: The VMWare datastore for 2TB+ LUNs must be VMFS-5 as it is now GPT based, not MBR. This can be updated on the fly without shutting down VMs (Configuration -> Storage, Click the Datastore -> “Upgrade to VMFS-5”) Expanding the virtual disks on MD3000i’s can only be done in CLI....