Unfortunately when I got onto site, it was discovered that one of the HP MSA arrays that is connected into part of our vSphere 4 environment had lost all power. Because of the half-arsed way that the consultancy company set it up (a process I was not involved with!) it took out the other enclosure with it.

Anyway, once power had been restored to the system, the vDisks were showing as offline and no amount of rebooting (at HP’s request) would bring them back online. Eventually the case was escalated to their level 2 team and I was asked to do the following:

• Disconnect (or power off) all hosts connected to the MSAs
• Telnet to the MSA that had lost power.
• Enter the command: trust enable
• Enter the command: trust vdisk vdiskname
• Wait for a minimum of 3 minutes.
• Enter the command: show vdisks

The disk with the name vdiskname should then appear as FTOL, and if not the commands above should be run a second time. This then needs to be run for all vDisks that have been set up on the MSA. I was told by HP to only run these commands when advised by HP, but I thought they may prove useful to someone somewhere.

And yes, I’m very pissed off with the consultants that set it up!!!

[Edit] Well, I have the confirmation email from Microsoft (it arrived about a couple of hours after I submitted the request) and the package label from UPS. Now I can take the boxed up 360 to my local UPS office Tuesday…

I recently screwed up my PC’s internet connection good and proper, which led me to re-image my machine. I use a program called Acronis True Image Home for making a clean install image that I can then restore as and when I like. The problem with this is that over time, you get programs installed and things set up just right and when you put that initial image back onto the machine it all disappears. Bummer.

So, what to do? Well, like I said, I took my “base” image using Acronis True Image Home, so I decided that it would be an idea to have a look and see if I can configure it to do what I needed. Firstly I had to set up a backup location, which I decided would be best if it was the NAS. True Image Home works flawlessly over a network so I have no issues with that and storing the data on the NAS will provide redundancy. The next step was to decide what to back up and how often. I use my email a lot, so I figured it was best to back that up daily. Along with my email, I back up other little personalisations of my profile, like Start menu folders and Quick Launch icons. Small things, but you really notice when they aren’t how you’ve got them set to your liking. Running a couple of test backups shows the daily backup to be around 40MB, depending on the amount of email I have, which completes in just a couple of minutes. This I scheduled as a full backup for early afternoon, at 3.00PM as my machine is frequently on during the day and if not, the backup will run as soon as the machine is turned on.

I then moved onto the machine itself. Obviously, this is going to be a much bigger backup. As I don’t install software too often, or change the configuration too much, I figured a once a month full backup is probably worthwile. This will run in the morning, doing a complete backup of the C: drive and for 20GB of data will take about an hour; using maximum compression gives an image of around 10GB.

Obviously, the strategy I’ve taken here is an attempt to minimise potential system downtime. If I screw my machine up again, I can restore the previous month’s computer image and then restore the last working profile image and any data loss should be minimal. Of course the real test is when something does happen and I have to restore. While it’s always good to test your backups, you won’t ever know until the fan has turned brown if they do what you need. I hope that I don’t have to let you know if it works or not, though I expect to.

Of course there are alternatives to Acronis – the best known is Symantec Ghost, but having used a few different packages, for my needs Acronis is the best.

Anyway, I don’t think this is the problem, as you can also set the limit on the Exchange connector, which is set to 10MB, which I believe would limit any mail that goes through the connector. But I have yet to test it out. Stay tuned!

I had 3 servers (2008) and a desktop (Vista) running on VMWare and my machine was getting slower and slower. Not long after I had powered on the last machine (the Vista desktop) I got a warning about memory… my machine was running low on 4GB!

Being the kind of rational individual I am, I hopped onto ebuyer and grabbed what I should have done in the first place – 2 sets of 4GB dual channel kits. So today I have installed the RAM, and everything is running sweet as a nut. All 5 (additional 2008 server installed today) VM’s are running and I’ve not hit the memory ceiling yet… although I am close at about 6GB.

At least I’m able to sell on the “old” stuff onto one of my colleagues for about 75% of what I paid for it…