All posts by Barry Mercer

IT

Snapdrive Service won’t start

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Had an issue recently where a fresh install of SnapDrive (7.0.3) wouldn’t complete and gave the following error  “Product: SnapDrive — Error 1920.Service SnapDrive (SWSvc) failed to start.  Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services and check your Event Log for more information.”

The server is located in a DMZ on a separate domain and is isolated from the network and the internet. I spent ages looking at this and eventually decided to run a “netstat -ano” to see what the service was doing. For whatever reason it looks like it’s trying to connect to GoDaddy’s CRL server. It seems that as the package is signed by netapp, part of the install downloads a new crl to make sure that it’s valid. Temporarily allowing my host out to the net on port 80 fixed the install issues. Incidentally, as soon as it’s installed you can close that port. From what I can tell it doesn’t check the CRL again….

 

Stuff

DFM missing statistics

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Had the issue recently where the DFM would stop reporting statistics on all of our volumes on some controllers. After spending an eternity digging around it seems that if you enable debug logging on the dfm you will see an error returned by the controller that it has run out of memory. You can increase it but please check this burt first http://support.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/bol?Type=Detail&Display=472940

To increase the memory from the default of 262144 do “options perf.dblade_zapi.buf_limit and select a higher number (in bytes). Try 307200 (300k) first then slowly increase it if you have no joy.

Stuff

snapdrive issues with 2003 servers and esxi 5.5

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“vmdk is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore”

[SnapDrive Error]: Please specify valid VMFS datastore name. (SnapDrive Error Code: 0xc0041033)

 

Have a read of this:

http://support.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/bol?Type=Detail&Display=600206

Create a new vmfs5 datastore and then add the key listed in the article. No need to restart snapdrive. snapdrive will then use that as the file to back the RDM when it does a verification.

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Snapdrive Underlying connection was closed VCenter 5 / 5.5

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It seems that a 2003 server doesn’t support the new SSL options that are enabled in the VC with 5.5 (and maybe earlier).

Try changing the following (taken from the release notes, which you’ve already read? 😉 :

  • On the vCenter Server host machine, reduce the implied security by allowing the server to communicate using weak cipher suites. To do this, include the following section in the vCenter Server vpxd.cfg file, located c:\Programdata\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter:
    <config>
    ...
    <vmacore>
    ...
    <ssl>
    ...
    <cipherList>ALL</cipherList>
    ...
    </ssl>
    ...
    </vmacore>
    ...
    </config>

restart the vcenter service and it should now hopefully work.

IT

Vcenter 4 Windows 8 Hangs / Disappears

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Having trouble installing Vcenter? If you look in %temp% the log file will give a clue, but it’s not obviosu to look there. Anyway, you need to install dot net 3.5 from the Add Features. You may get an error if you can’t get on to the internet, in that case, stick your CD in and run

Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3 /All /Source:D:\sources\sxs/LimitAccess

 

Or change /source to point to some network location that has an extract of the cd. Should work then!