Virtually Jason

A while back, I posted a quick script to create commands for  1:1 Zoning on a Brocade Fiber Switch .  I was recently helping someone go through that exact process on a set of switches that had a lot of aliases already defined on them.  Their challenge was that they weren't sure which aliases were for their current SAN vs. a retired SAN.  Rather than just creating zones for both SANs, I decided to put together a quick script that would scrape their current Aliases and check which ones have active WWNs currently in the system.  They could then use this information to prune the Aliases that are no longer needed, in addition to only creating the required zones for our project. In order to do this task, I had to do some quick string parsing into PowerShell objects .  Good thing I already know how to do that ;)  So, I put together this script which does two things: 1) It parses the Brocade Fiber Switch's configuration to look for any Aliases 2) It checks...

One of my customers was experiencing some extreme IO latency in their environment: in the hundreds of ms.  Obviously, there was some pain associated with this issue, and so they asked for help.  This environment had 3 HP c7000 chassis and 2 different SANs; the issue was affecting every host accessing every LUN, so we decided that the issue must be in the fiber channel fabric somewhere. After poking around, we quickly realized that the firmware on the Brocade switches was from January 2013, so was quite old.  I pulled up top on each switch and saw no appreciable CPU or Memory usage.  Next, I looked at porterrshow to see if there were any problems on the switches; each one had a single port that had a ridiculous number of Enc Out errors.  I cleared the error stat counters by using portstatsclear -i 0-33 and then issued another porterrshow , and found that we had roughly 100,000 Enc Out errors on that port each second.  Coincidentally, each switch had 1 p...

One of my customers asked me to help out with the zoning configuration on their Brocade fiber switches.  I'm neither a SAN nor a network engineer, but I've created a few fiber zones in my time.  The best practice that I've always heard is to create 1:1 zones.  That means that each zone has 1 initiator (an ESXi host's VMHBA) and 1 target (the storage processor on the SAN).  This is a very simple process, but it's also really arduous and really boring, especially as environments scale up with redundant VMHBAs and multiple SANs with redundant storage processors. So, I spent a little bit of time reading about how to use the Brocade CLI , then moved forward.  I'm not quite confident enough in my scripting to actually enable any changes on the Brocade switches (after all, if you mess something up, storage could simply go away), so what I did was create a PowerCLI script that generates a bunch of Brocade CLI commands.  These commands (after you've read them over...