Posts tagged equallogic
Tweaking Equallogic SAN HQ Alerts
Oct 16th
SAN HeadQuarters is a free tool for Equallogic arrays that allows for centralized monitoring, logging, alerting ,reporting, and analysis across multiple Equallogic Groups. While the default alerts are usual sufficient, there may be times when it is a little too verbose. One hypothetical situation is if a vendor sets up the array and configures it in a manner that SAN HQ would typically send a warning for, e.g. allocating more than 95% of the array. While it would be best to resolve the issue, circumstances may not allow for that, so one would want to stop sending warnings for that issue. To do that, we can go into SAN HQ and then:
- Select Settings -> Email Settings
- Change to the Notifications Tab
- Select the Group
- Uncheck ‘Enabled’ for the message to ignore
Equallogic Firmware Upgrade Error
Jul 31st
When upgrading the Equallogic SAN firmware, the following error may appear: gzip: stdout: Broken pipe tar: child returned status 1 18:19:46 Space required: 25MB, available 24MB
The cause of this was leftover files on the SAN. In this particular case, there were multiple .core files on the unit, as was evident by FTP’ing into the unit and looking at the filesystem. The main problem being the very large ‘MgmtExec.core’. Assuming the issues have since been resolved, both of these .core files can be safely deleted. Cores are created by the SAN during previous issues and remain there until the next ‘diag’ is run. If a diag on this group has not been done for awhile then they would still be there causing the firmware upgrade failure.
Installing Equallogic Multipathing Extension Module (MEM) Plugin for vSphere
Jun 23rd
If you’re using an Equallogic PS series array for your vSphere storage, it is highly recommended to utilize the Equallogic MEM Plugin. Some of the benefits that your environment will reap are:
- Easing iSCSI Setup
- Increasing bandwidth
- Reducing network latency
- Automating load balancing across multiple active paths
- Automating connection management
- Automating failure detection and failover
The following is a walk-through of an example installation. For more details on the steps performed, please consult the Technical Report.
Pre-requisites:
- ESX or ESXi >= 4.1 with Enterprise licensing
- VMware vMA 4.01 or VMware CLI 4.1
- Equallogic array firmware >= 4.3
The following utilizes the vMA to perform the installation. The vMA is an excellent tool, and in addition to help set this up, it can also be used as an excellent ESXi Syslog Server.
- Obtain the zip file containing the setup perl script and the package itself: https://www.equallogic.com/support/download_file.aspx?id=1101. You will need to SCP this over to your vMA server.
- Unzip the file which you scp’d over. Do NOT unzip the zip file inside, which is a VIB offline bundle.
- Place your host into maintenance mode.
More >
Shrinking Equallogic Volumes
Mar 28th
Shrinking a volume is not available via the Equallogic GUI.
To do so, it must be done via the CLI. Telnet into the group, and select the volume that is to be shrinked.
You must then put the volume offline (in this case, I put the volume offline via the GUI already). To shrink the volume, simply execute:
shrink 1234G
The size to put here is the total size you want the volume to be after the shrink, it is NOT the size you want to shrink the volume by. Additionally, put a G or M after the size to specify the unit.
A snapshot is automatically created prior to the shrink, and can be deleted after testing. This obviously doesn’t cover the necessary steps to shrink the partition residing on the volume, which can vary depending on the format.