Check action progress on Dell MD3000i array

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....

July 18, 2014 · Myles Gray

Setting Up Multi-NIC vMotion in vSphere 5.5

Multi-NIC vMotion is a no-brainer configuration for performance ↗: Faster maintenance mode operations Better DRS load balance operations Overall reduction in lead time of a manual vMotion process. It was introduced in vSphere 5.0 ↗ and has improved in v5.5 - so let’s get into how to configure it (we’ll be using the vSphere Web Client because that’s what VMWare wants us to do nowadays…). I don’t have an Enterprise Plus license so no Distributed Switches for me - however, if you do have Distributed Switching licenses you should be able to extrapolate from my Standard Switching how to config yours...

June 7, 2014 · Myles Gray

Extend Dell MD3000i Virtual Disk LUN Size

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....

September 4, 2013 · Myles Gray