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Posts in Storage
Expanding VMWare guest storage and extending LVM volumes and ext3 file systems to use the new storage
One of my production vSphere virtual machines came close to running out of space this past week. Expanding guest storage with vSphere is a breeze, and I wanted to jot down my notes in this blog post. To expand the size of a virtual disk, you will need to open the virtual infrastructure client, right click your guest and click "Edit Settings". Once the virtual machine settings window opens, you will need to navigate to the disk that you want to expand…
$ read more →Generating Netbackup throughput data reports
If you support Netbackup at your site, I'm sure you've had to look into issues with slow clients and failed backups. The nbstatus script I mentioned in a previous post is useful for identifying connection problems, but it doesn't help you understand how well your clients are performing. To help me understand how much data my clients are pushing, I wrote the nbthroughput shell script: The script will display the fastest clients, the slowest clients, and how much data your clients are pushing to your media servers. I find it useful, so I thought I would post it here for others to use.
$ read more →Scanning Linux hosts for newly added ESX storage devices
I currently support a number of Linux hosts that run inside VMWare vSphere server. Periodically I need to add new storage devices to these hosts, which requires me to login to the vSphere client and add the device through the "edit settings" selection. The cool thing about vSphere is that the LUNs are dynamically added to the guest, and the guest will see the devices once the SCSI bus has been scanned. There are several ways to scan for storage devices, but the simplest way I've found is to use the rescan-scsi-bus.sh shell script that comes with the sg3_utils package…
$ read more →Getting a daily status report from your Netbackup infrastructure
I support a couple of Netbackup environments, and like to keep tabs on what is going on with my media and master servers. There are a slew of reports available in the GUI and CLI interfaces, and these reports cover everything from Netbackup errors to tape reports to what is occurring with vault jobs. The two reports I find most useful are the jobs report and the errors report. These reports can be access through the bpdbjobs and bperror commands, and produce a nice summary of the jobs that ran and any errors that occurred…
$ read more →Scanning SCSI controllers for new LUNs on Centos and Fedora Linux hosts
While building out a new ESX guest, I had to scan for a new SCSI device I added. To scan a SCSI controller for new LUNs, you can echo the "- - -" string to the SCSI controller's scan sysfs node: Now you may be asking yourself, what do those three dashes mean? Well, here is the answer from the Linux 2.6.31 kernel source (I had to look this up to recall): As you can see above, the three values passed to the scan value are the channel, id and lun number you want to scan. The "-" equates to a wild card, which causes all of the channels, ids and luns to be scanned…
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