Emre Kurnaz's IT Diary

I have been using Isilon simulator for a long time to test some features and prepare myself to some projects. Knowing that this is a home environment, I am also performing patch installations when I have time. Lets first power on the Powerscale nodes on my Vmware Workstation. We will need to wait some time for all nodes to totally up and running. Lets check if we are able to login from the cli and run "isi status" to check the cluster status. Next, we will need to download the Rollup Patch from the Dell Technologies Support page. After downloading we will need to extract the file. You will see that the contents of the file similar to below; here we will need to upload the file with the pkg extension to the /ifs/data/Isilon_Support/ .  I am using FileZilla to perform the upload I can verify that the file is there. Here we are ready to Perform  the code upgrade. This part really important since we are here only performing the code upgrade, in a real work scenario, you will nee...

For a long time, I have been using a home lab environment for many things. The way, I am doing is that, cloning from my template virtual machines to provision new ones, and change settings manually. This is not rocket science, however I wanted to ease and automate one of my basic processes. Using Vmware Workstation Pro 16 in my environment, I noticed that there is a Rest Api provided within the software, and noticed that there is no option for creating a virtual machine from the scratch however, there is an option to clone a VM to another, which I was surprised to see but liked a lot. While further digging, I noticed that I can use Terraform to do such provisioning using Vmware Workstation provider , which I was thinking to use. I was super excited to use Terraform for the first time in my life, so I cloned a new Virtual Machine, set its IP Address, create the DNS records as I described in my blog article  etc. I checked Terraform deployment article, prepare the prerequisites and i...

When working with enterprise systems, it is always good to have a lab system that you can easily try  and break things. Today, I will be writing about one of my favorite products, Dell EMC ECS, which is sometimes scary when I need to perform some uncommon things. I am following the GitHub website for Dell EMC ECS Community Edition , for the latest release and install this version. Today, the most recent version available is 3.7.0.0 and you may directly download the OVA file from here . You may also read the Release Notes  but dont forget that this article is aimed for Community Edition, thus keep in mind that this will be an unsupported deployment and purposed for lab and testing basically. For the enterprise Dell EMC ECS products, you may visit Dell Technologies website. OK, lets continue with the deployment. I assume you have the OVA file already downloaded and ready to be deployment. In my Vmware Workstation setup, I do click on File > Open and select the OVA file to dep...

One of the most struggling parts of administrating a huge NAS system like Isilon/Powerscale is Antivirus management. ICAP is the most used protocol for Antivirus scanning, which is basically, NAS is sending the file to the Antivirus server and wait for the file analysis and quarantine/truncate etc if needed. Most of the NAS admins can complain how this approach is not that much effective with the aspect of resource utilization and performance of antivirus scanning. CAVA is currently available on Powerscale OneFS versions 9.1 and later, and supports SMB protocol only. What it does is sharing the IFS filesystem only to CAVA servers over a restricted zone and IP Pool and relies on the filesystem auditing.  Whenever a file access is requested, the audit is sent to the CAVA/CEE Agent on the Antivirus server for him to identify what filepath needs to be scanned, and access the file path over CHECK$ share and performs the scan. To have a successful implementation of CAVA, please make sure...

As building many labs in my home environment, I usually need DNS server which is easily deployed. Knowing that there are many alternatives, if just in case of A records to be created, I leverage from AdGuard  which is really helpful. I am running AdGuard on a Docker container to simplifying the installation process, I recommend this way of setup to everyone. It is clearly described in the Docker Hub  , so you can customize your setup here by following the docker run parameters for the AdGuard container. Assume we have installed the AdGuard successfully and it's homepage is accessible from your desktop. When logged in you should be able to see the Dashboard of AdGuard. Here below you may see a sample of AdGuard of my setup. or To be able to setup a DNS server on AdGuard, which is pretty easy. First you need to navigate to the "Custom Filtering Rules" page by clicking "Filters" from the page header. From the "Custom Filtering Rules" page, you will need...

To perform a successful RP4VM upgrade, first get the current versions of your ESXi (can be VxRail) and RP4VM versions and decide what versions you can upgrade to. The rule of thumb is here to upgrade the RP4VM first and upgrade ESXi (VxRail) afterwards if needed. Always consult, Dell Technologies Support or access to Solve Online to get the relevant procedures for the upgrade. Moreover, always start with the replication target cluster and then upgrade production cluster. Do not perform RP4VM upgrade simulataneously on connected clusters. As a preperation, I usually download the Upgrade and Maintenance Kit  from support website, and extract the file to a location which is capable to upload files to Recoverpoint for VMs Deployer and SSH/SFTP to the ESXi hosts. Uploading the vibs to /scratch directory to each ESXi host can be time saving before starting the vib upgrades. In general, the upgrade has 3 phases. Upgrading vRPAs Upgrading vibs Upgrading Plugin Upgrading vRPAs After mak...