HPE Nimble Storage – Change Target IQN Following a Group Name Change

We were conducting a data centre relocation which involved moving an HPE Nimble Storage array, changing the array name and group is straight forward enough, this can be done from the GUI within the “Hardware” section. However once changed clients still see the old group name which included the old name of the array. Resolving […]

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Testing S3 Access (and Performance) with s3cmd (for Dell ECS)

There are graphical tools to test and use the Dell ECS S3 interface, but everyone wants a CLI right? The below should also work for AWS S3 (with some modification) but this documentation is intended for specific use with the Dell ECS S3 endpoint to verify behaviour and perform some performance testing. The below assumes […]

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Dell ECS Recall Performance (from Dell PowerScale)

The Dell ECS is an object based storage platform, in our case we are using it as an archive layer to our Dell PowerScale platform; where it provides a single-namespace file-system allowing “cooler” data to be pushed to the “cheaper”, slower Dell ECS storage freeing up the front-end storage for new data that is “hot” […]

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Dell PowerScale – Find Connected Clients

Finding the connected clients to a Dell PowerScale storage cluster is fairly straightforward, however you should be aware that it only shows clients that have active IO (input-output) operations in flight at the time you run the command. You can still have clients connected, but are idling, so are invisible. You can also specify a […]

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Cheeky VMware ESXi iSCSI Storage Test Script (HPE Nimble Storage)

When building a new VMware ESXi host or when troubleshooting any storage issues, it can be quite laborious to test each possible path, especially when you have multiple storage arrays. The script below makes this easy, just add the HPE Nimble Storage iSCSI Discovery IP Address(es) and then the iSCSI Storage Port IP Addresses as […]

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VMware Check Path Selection Policy for Datastores

The Path Selection Policy is set for devices to determine how the ESXi host will utilise the paths to the storage, for example, you can have “Fixed” or “Round Robin” or “Most Recently Used”, you can also have storage vendor provided ones such as “NIMBLE_PSP_DIRECTED”. The scripts and commands I’ve found keep mentioning “Multipathing”, if […]

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Simple Disk Performance Testing Tool (for Microsoft Windows)

Running a disk test need not be complicated. Microsoft provide a cheeky little hard disk test program that can be used, you can download it from https://github.com/microsoft/diskspd. A simple run can be completed with the following command to test the hard drive performance based on the parameters entered. If you wish you can add “> […]

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Multi-Factor (MFA/2FA) Authentication for HPE Nimble Storage using Okta

The HPE Nimble Storage array can be managed via a Web Interface, SSH Console or API, you can Active Directory (or LDAP in later NimbleOS version) integrate the array for management access. At the time of writing MFA or 2FA is not natively supported, however I believe it is on their roadmap to add SAML […]

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