Tag Archives: Lion

Of VNX, Mountain Lions, and Lessons Learned

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Mac-OS-X-Mountain-Lion-2It has been a busy week in the tech industry. There were several major conferences including Dell Storage Forum, Cisco Live, and Microsoft TechEd to name a few. Apple also had their annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). While the iOS 6 announcement may have stole the show, Apple also announced MAC OS 10.8 (Mountain Lion).

 

Now you may remember my post around this time last year when MAC OS 10.7 came out and I was asking everyone to please upgrade. Well I have some good news on this regarding 10.8. I received an email the other day from Drew Schlussel that said that the latest beta had completed it’s testing and things were looking good. This is great news to me and should be encouraging to everyone. Apple can still change things between now and when MAC OS 10.8 goes GA later this summer, and engineering will continue to test against the latest build when it becomes available.

 

Looking back at last year, the MAC OS changes present a unique challenge to vendors. The low price of adoption for customers make widespread implementation a lot more common. Combine that with the ever increasing movement of Bring-Your-Own-Device in the workplace, and IT departments are losing control over what versions of software and operating systems are in their environment.

 

With the amount of time it takes for an engineering department to discover a bug, create a fix, perform testing, and publish the new code, we ended up being one of the few that had fixes before the final version of MAC OS 10.7 was available. Once new code is available, it takes time to do an upgrade. Last year, the majority of our upgrades were still being performed by EMC’s Customer Engineers. This additional scheduling time was also compounded by the change control in place at many organizations which are often on a 6 month upgrade cycle at best. This perfect storm can spell disaster when a major issue is discovered.

 

So what is being done in the future to prevent a repeat problem? Well this year, upgrades on the VNX are pretty much a self-service option at this point. When new code is available, customers can use the Unisphere Service Manager to upgrade their boxes that day. You no longer need to open a ticket and schedule an on-site visit as it can all be done from the comfort of your computer in the office (LAN connection is preferred).

 

All that is left is your own internal change control process. VNX is currently on a roughly 6 – 8 week service pack release cycle. Armed with this knowledge, you can start filing for your next upgrade just as soon as you apply your current one and you’ll stay right in line with all the enhancements and fixes that come with every upgrade. I am a big proponent of shorter upgrade cycles and I encourage everyone to upgrade their VNX as close as you can to when new code is released.

Are you running MAC OS X 10.7 and have a Celerra? It may be time for an upgrade!

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As just about everyone on the internet knows, on July 20th Apple released the OS X 10.7 (aka Lion) to the public. $30 gets you a boat load of new features. One of these features is a completely rewritten CIFS client. For those of you who don’t know, CIFS is the protocol used for windows file sharing and is a big part of the EMC Celerra / VNX product. We have identified an incompatibility within our code. The good news there is a fix available for all DART code families (5.6, 6.0, and 7.0) and we are encouraging everyone to upgrade as soon as possible.

 

On July 14th, EMC has released ETA emc263721 (powerlink credentials required) to address this issue. An ETA (EMC Technical Advisory) is a way for EMC to notify customers proactively to address issues such as this before it happens in their environment. This details the problem and states the current fix. For this issue, we have put the fix into the following code levels:

• 5.6.51.323 or higher

• 5.6.52.201 or higher

• 6.0.43.104 or higher

• 7.0.14.100 or higher

• 7.0.35.301 or higher

You can figure out your code version by running the following command from the CLI: “server_version ALL” (without the quotes). If your current version is the same or newer than the versions I listed above, then no action is required on your part and you are fine to deploy OS X 10.7 in your environment. If your code is below these levels I urge you to upgrade as soon as possible (especially if your environment contains a large number of Macintosh computers). To schedule an update, simply call EMC Support (800-782-4362), open a service request on powerlink, or speak with your local field resources.