Category: Work

Posts related to my Work

Implementing SnapVault backups – the hard way

Christian 1 Comment

Well, I recently had the pleasant task of implementing SnapVault backups, that are being shipped to an offsite location with SnapMirror.

That in itself isn’t the bad thing, however we decided against Protection Manager (since it was a charged product back when we decided on this). So I basically had the three tasks:

  1. Actually implement the SnapVault stuff (and learn my way around it and also document it)
  2. Write a bunch of scripts, that help us in creating scheduled backups of our databases
  3. Create a monitoring script, that’ll fit into our Nagios environment already in place

Well, two months later (sadly it still has some kinks – I can’t figure out this one bug though for the life of it) and a few hundred hours of working on/with it and out came four things:

  1. Bash-scripts to create the SnapVault/SnapMirror relations
  2. Powershell scripts to trigger the SnapVault updates
  3. a Nagios plugin, based on NetApp’s SDK for Data ONTAP (even if the API is crap from time to time – it’s still better than using SNMP)

I’ll post those things one after another, once I wrote up all the articles.

MDS9000: Setting summer time for CET

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After rebuilding two MDS9148, I wanted them to correctly switch the summer/winter time for my time zone. Currently I’m in CET (or CEST during the summer), so I googled for that. The search came up with Cisco-FAQ, however that needed a slight adjustment.

Apparently the NXOS doesn’t support the feature “recurring” in the clock configuration. So I had to slightly adapt the configuration line:

vCenter: Removing VSC custom attributes

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Well, yesterday I got pissed of those Virtual Storage Console custom attributes.

Currently we don’t use the Provisioning & Cloning feature of the VSC, thus we don’t need the custom attributes. After poking around, I decided to write a short PowerCLI script to do the task.

It’s really rather simple, so here goes:

NetApp: Changing DS4243 shelf ID

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I’m working on a project right now, providing a SnapVault target for our “big” NetApp. So we moved our 3240 to it’s target location, I spent most of my time yesterday doing the cabling (SAS and ACP, as well as power).

I’m still not finished, I still need to “beautify” the power cables, need to fix the network cables (currently I don’t have none ….) and some other minor stuff. But lemme skip back a bit.

The 3240 initially had only two shelfs, one with the ID 10 and the other with the ID 50. When reimplementing the thing, I wanted to do two things:

  1. Make the shelfs “proper” (i.e. adjacent shelf IDs)
  2. Make sure it’s done right
So, I ended up googling the topic (or rather NetApping, since the NOW page isn’t being indexed), and found a NetApp Community post. As I already did a complete wipe/cleanconfig of both filers, I was left with this:
  1. Halt both controllers (don’t power them off!)
  2. Change the shelf ID using the front panel of the DS4243
  3. Power-cycle each shelf
  4. Wait at least 30 seconds
  5. Boot both controllers
And that actually did it, my HA controllers are up and running, with the new shelf ID’s.

NetApp: Migrating FCP luns with ndmpcopy to another controller

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Well, I’m in a situation, where I need to move all volumes from one controller to two others. So I looked at the ways I had available:

  1. Freshly implementing everything: No option at all!
  2. vol copy: Is rather slow, thus no option
  3. ndmpcopy: That’s exactly what I needed!

ndmpcopy is a great way to copy over a whole volume including it’s files (thus FCP luns) to another volume/controller.

First I threw in a crossover cable, since at around 6 PM our backup system starts it’s daily run, and everything else running via IP in between 6 PM and 6 AM is seriously impaired by this. Configured the additional ports on all three controllers (picked a private, not-routed range just in case) and then kicked of a simple bash script that ran the following:

Now, that in itself worked like a charm as you can see from the output below.

However, once I switched the UCS into the correct VSAN and modified the Boot Policy, the XenServer would boot, but didn’t find *any* Storage Repository. So I went ahead and looked at the CLI of the XenServer, looked at /var/log/messages and saw that apparently the PBD’s weren’t there yet (for whatever reason).

Poked around in /dev/disk/by-id, looked at the output of xe pbd-list and found that the SCSI-IDs used in the PBD’s we’re actually not present yet. So I was like *wtf* for a moment, however then took a quick peek at the output of lun show -v /vol/vol_xen_boot on both NetApp controllers and found the cause for my troubles:

As you can see, the lun itself is available and mapped with the correct LUN ID. However, if you look closely at the serial of both LUNs you might notice what I noticed. So it turns out, ndmpcopy does the copy-process, however you need to adjust the LUN serial on the destination controller to match the one from the source controller, otherwise it’ll throw any system out of whack.

After adjusting that, everything came up just fine. And I’m finished with my first XenServer environment, only the big one is still copying.

UCS 5108 power redundancy lost

Christian 2 Comments

Well, another day – another UCS error. Out of the blue, one of our chassis started displaying that one PSU had failed, however the UCS was showing no PSU had failed *shrug*

Well, as it turns out – this is yet another known bug in 2.0.2(r). You’ll either have to unplug and plug all the power cables (that’s four) in a maintainance window – or simply change the Equipment Power Policy (found in the Root of your UCS, tab Policy)

from “N+1” to “Non Redundant”; wait a minute or two till the error is “fixed” and then change it back to “N+1”. Problem solved for now … 😀

NetApp LUN creation/vol sizing

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Well, as you might know I’ve been tinkering with a NetApp FAS at work. The last few months, I’ve been trying to figure out a few things, which I actually did.

One “error” I ran into with creating the lun’s and volumes by hand was that the volumes were running out of space. Even if the volume was a bit larger than the LUN. After that happened a few times, I decided to see how to fix that. As it turns out, the GUI “fixes” that already in a way I wouldn’t have expected.

The GUI wizard for creating a new LUN simply enlarges the hosting volume by three percent (that’s 3%!). So if you create a 300GiB LUN, the GUI will create a volume with 309GiB (well about that – the GUI calculates in KiB thus you’ll see something like 324009984k in the output of vol size).

I also wrote a short script, which will sum up the space of all LUNs contained inside a volume and then based on your snap reserve and the actual LUN space give you the current vol size and the vol size it should be. I’ll post the script later on.

UCS 5108: VIF down

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Well, I have yet another weird UCS problem. I have a single blade, that has trouble with it’s primary fabric attachment.

UCS 5108: Server overview
UCS 5108: Error Message

The problem get’s even more weird, if you look at the details.

UCS 5108: VIF Paths

After looking at the IO modules, the error doesn’t become any clearer:

UCS 5108: IOM port states

So far, I have tried nearly everything. I’ve tried resetting the active and passive Connectivity of the vNIC, I tried resetting the DCE adapter for the vNIC, but nothing. I even tried resetting the vHBA that’s associated with this fabric, but that didn’t result to anything. Not even the usual flogi (fibre channel login) errors, that you get when either booting/resetting the blade.

Well, I opened a TAC case and the Cisco engineer looked over the CLI of my fabric interconnects, hacked away at the thousand logs the UCS keeps, and asked me if I could switch the blade to another slot. However, since I don’t have any slots to spare – the five chassis are full – he said he’d start the RMA process for the MK81R mezzanine card.

The new MK81R arrived a few days later, however the issue still persisted. So the TAC engineer suggested I’d pull the IO module and plug in a “new” one (one that I knew was working). So I picked a Friday afternoon for the maintainance window (since I didn’t know if the blades would survive a IO module failover) and pulled one from my newly arrived chassis and reseated the one I knew to be faulty.

Guess what: after swapping the IO modules, the error is completely gone …. *shrug* I don’t have a clue how this error happened or why it was fixed by pulling and plugging the IO module. Guess another error for the odd category.

UCS 5108: Power problem

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Well, I recently had yet another UCS display/I2C communication problem. Somehow one of my chassis’ started to think, that the power redundancy was lost.

F0408: Power redundancy failed

After looking at it a bit deeper, it seems only the GUI or the chassis did notice this power glitch:

UCS 5108: Power status

As you can see, all PSU’s still have power. Now, since I had a big maintainance window the last weekend anyhow (and I spent ~14 hours at work), I decided to restart the IO modules in that chassis. And guess what: The error is gone! Another weird I2C communication issue with the firmware release 2.0.2 …

SMT mirroring troubles

Christian Leave a comment

Well, I’ve been having issues with our SMT. Basically after the release of SLES11 SP2 in February, I’ve been waiting for the repositories to turn “mirrorable”, which they haven’t yet. So I wrote a mail to the EMEA customer support.

And yesterday I got a reply, stating that my mirror credentials had been regenerated. And guess what ? I can mirror stuff again. So if you ever have any issues like the ones I described (or any of the people in the forum threads experienced), write a mail to your Novell customer support. 😛