Monthly Archives: June 2016

Nimble Disk Failv2

What happens when a Nimble Storage disk drive fails?

I’ve worked with Nimble Storage devices for over 2 years now, they constantly amaze me, but one of the thing I’ve yet to see in the field is an actual failure. So the other morning at 3am, I received an email about a failed disk, so I thought I’d walk those through the process of what happens.

After all, if you going to buy a new storage device, you want to know exactly how it acts in a failure scenario, wouldn’t you?

Failure Alert – Infosight and Autosupport at its best

So three things happened almost instantaneously when the failure happened;

  • Email alert sent to the recipients configured on the Nimble Storage Array
  • Failure information sent to Nimble Storage’s Infosight website
  • A support case was automatically opened with all the necessary details

Below I’ve also included screenshots of the array status page, and the event logs on the Nimble Storage device as well, where you will see normal operations such as snapshots continued.

So all I had to do in the morning was confirm the address where the parts are to be sent, and if an engineer was needed.

Note: with the service offerings from Nimble, you can opt, in the times of hardware failure, to have the replacements sent out as soon as it hits Infosight, or to confirm the delivery of parts before they are sent. For this environment, we chose the latter.

Nimble Disk Fail - email alert

Nimble Disk Fail - Infosight

Nimble Disk Fail - Array Status (failed disk)

Nimble Disk Fail - Event Log (failed disk, raid degraded)

So how do you resolve the issue?

Continue reading What happens when a Nimble Storage disk drive fails?

PowerShell logo

Powershell – Get-ADuser and output the homedrives to CSV file

I had a customer with around 27 file servers used as locations for AD home drives. We needed to do some analysis on which users used which server, as things like DFS or a strategy of where to place users were not in place. So PowerShell to the rescue.

A simple version of this script is;

get-aduser -Filter * -properties * | select DisplayName,Enabled,HomeDirectory,LastLogonDate,CanonicalName | Export-csv -path c:\scripts\userhomefolder.csv

I created this more complex script after the amount of unique objects exceeded the maximum filter within excel, so by splitting into a file per server fixed this.

First off, create an array with the multiple file servers, then used the “foreach” command to loop a PowerShell command with each file server name.

We look into all user’s in AD and output to a CSV file any users with file server X into a CSV file.

#Add the AD module into the Powershell session
Import-module ActiveDirectory

#Array containing each File Server, can be FQDN or short name
$fileservers = 'FS1','FS2','FS3'

#Loop to run a script for each object in the array against all AD users, outputs in CSV to C:\ folder
Foreach ($fileserver in $Fileservers)
{
get-aduser -Filter * -properties * | select DisplayName,Enabled,HomeDirectory,LastLogonDate,CanonicalName | Where {$_.HomeDirectory -like "*$fileserver*"} |Export-csv -path c:\scripts\userhomefolder2-$fileserver.csv
}

 

Regards

 

Dean