Author: Danilo

Using IOmeter on Windows is an article that shows how to measure disk IOPS with the IOmeter tools under a Windows OS. First and foremost, What is IOmeter? Iometer is a workload generator based on a client/server architecture. A graphical user interface, named Iometer, acts as a server coordinating the workers. The workers, named Dynamo, do the real I/O. To download the Windows IOmeter, click here. Why Should I Use IOmeter? The IOmeter is a client/server tool for measuring disk input/output per second (IOPS). If you have a block device offered by a storage system and need to measure its…

Shutting Down the PowerFlex Manager Cluster shows how to properly shut down the PowerFlex Management cluster to avoid database issues. We have written some PowerFlex articles. Some of them are introductions to the PowerFlex solution and how to deploy a PowerFlex Manager cluster on Linux. You can click on each link below to read both articles: Our lab environment is based on the PowerFlex 4.5.2 version: Warning: I haven’t tested it on older PowerFlex versions. So, be careful and use it at your own risk! First and Foremost, What is the PowerFlex Manager? PowerFlex Manager simplifies deployment, management, and automation…

A friend of mine asked me to help solve an issue related to an entire vSAN cluster going down after changing MTU values. Because this subject can sometimes seem complex and confusing, I created this simple post to explain it. So, let’s explore some MTU, VDS and VMKernel details. What is the issue? Let’s explain it. The vSAN cluster is a standard cluster with four ESXi nodes. The vCenter Server is embedded in this cluster, and the customer has several production VMs running. The top-of-rack switches are Cisco-based, and the configured MTU is 9000 bytes. It means that all node…

Creating an SMB File Server with PowerFlex shows how to create a File Server using the PowerFlex solution. First and foremost, our PowerFlex solution is a lab environment made of nested virtual machines (VMs). We are running the 4.5.2 version! PowerFlex can work as a file-based storage system, providing SMB and NFS shares to network clients. Before starting and creating our shares, we must deploy a Resource Group. The Resource Group will create a cluster from a pre-configured Template. This cluster will serve volumes through NAS protocols such as SMB and NFS. The following picture shows that our Resource Group…

PowerFlex SCLI Basics show some useful commands for managing a PowerFlex cluster by command line. PowerFlex CLI (SCLI) is installed as part of the MDM component. It can be found in the following operational systems: Before using most SCLI commands, you must log in using the following command (for the 4.5.2 version, for example): As we can see in the following picture, the “scli –login“ command has worked; however, since this MDM node is not the “Primary MDM node,” all subsequent commands fail: As showed you before, our Primary MDM is the “SDS03”. To switch the Primary MDM ownership to…

Working with Fault Sets on PowerFlex shows what Fault Sets are and how they can be used.This is a simple example of how we can work with Fault Sets. All tests were performed in a lab environment using virtual machines (nested lab). The PowerFlex version is 4.5.2. First and foremost, what is Dell PowerFlex? Dell PowerFlex is a software-defined storage platform that combines storage and compute resources into a single system. It offers high performance, scalability, and flexibility for modern data center needs. PowerFlex supports block storage in two-layer (compute and storage separate) or single-layer (hyper-converged) deployments (we can also mix both types of implementation). It is ideal for applications like…