Monthly Archives: June 2017

Reclaim thin provisioned space in VMware datastore

Posted by on June 30, 2017 No comments

We were using a portable storage array as temporary storage array to store data from an older array that had to be reconfigured. Capacity was quite an issue and everything would barely fit (with dedupe and compression doing its best on the Dell EMC XtremIO we were using for this), but we discovered that provisioned space wasn’t immediately reclaimed, so we got a bit into trouble when space wasn’t immediately reclaimed when data was deleted from a VMware version 5 datastore.

We were facing two options:

  • Datastore VMFS version 6: Unmap automatically every 12 hours (not 100% sure about this interval)
  • Datastore VMFS version 5: Unmap manually from the ESXi command line:

esxcli storage vmfs unmap -l XIO-05-VMFS-013

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Brocade SAN Switch commands that prove to be very useful

Posted by on June 8, 2017 No comments

Brocade commands are usually very easy to find out. Simply type “help” and look for the command you think you need, but what exactly does each command do? Here’s a list:

Info

uptime                          – Same as unix uptime
date                              – Same as unix date
version                          – Gives versions of firmwares & OS

Hardware State

faultshow                     – Show switch faults
fanshow                       – Show switch FAN faults
psshow                        – Show switch POWER SUPPLY faults
tempshow                    – Show switch TEMPERATURE values
switchstatusshow          – Overall status of switch

Config

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