What Dell say. SAN HeadQuarters (SAN HQ) provides consolidated performance and robust event monitoring across multiple virtualized EqualLogic SAN groups. It gathers and formats performance data and other vital group information for easy viewing and quick analysis of multiple aspects of group performance.

With SAN HQ, you have the ability to centrally monitor alerts, get historical performance reporting, and perform trend analysis for capacity planning and troubleshoot. SAN HeadQuarters is included free with all EqualLogic arrays. Download Movie Hate Story 1 In Hd more. You need to sign up for an EqualLogic support account and register the Service Tag from your EqualLogic arrays.

Once you have done this you can download SAN HeadQuarters 2.0. Run the installer for SAN HeadQuarters and Click Next.

Dell EqualLogic SAN HEADQUARTERS. Or management of volumes or the many software features. SAN HQ Quick Links. Download SAN HQ; EqualLogic PS4000 and SAN.

A reddit dedicated to the profession of Computer System Administration • Community members shall conduct themselves with professionalism. • Do not expressly advertise your product. More details on the may be found. For IT career related questions, please visit Please check out our, which includes lists of subreddits, webpages, books, and other articles of interest that every sysadmin should read! Checkout the Users are encouraged to contribute to and grow our Wiki. So you want to be a sysadmin? Official IRC Channel - #reddit-sysadmin on Official Discord - •.

I inherited an EqualLogic PS4000 at my current job that I don't think has ever had the firmware updated on it. It has been working pretty well, so I've been content to leave well enough alone until recently. I've run into the iSCSI dropping on large backup jobs, and support seems to think this may fix it. I'm biting the bullet and going to upgrade it. I have an active support contract, and will be engaging Dell as part of this, but I wanted some boots on the ground opinions before engaging in this. Have VERY good backups before starting. We encountered a full SAN failure after applying an EqualLogic PS series firmware update.

The array marked drives bad that were not marked previously bad and dropped all the RAID sets offline. Dell told us that they could not help us recover the data, but could send us warranty replacement drives. We very nearly encountered a dual SAN failure due to this. Both the primary and secondary SAN arrays were updated at the same time (not my call) and both encountered the same problem. We dumped these arrays shortly afterwards and moved to another vendor. This x 1,000.

We also experienced an EqualLogic PS6500 series failure due to a controller firmware update. Long story short, after the second controller reset, the configuration was lost and we were looking at the initial array setup prompts. It took 36 hours, but EQL engineers were able to write a hot fix for us that restored the configuration. It was one of the worst disaster recovery experiences I have had to learn from. Moreover, while having good backups is critical, it will not help you if your array becomes bricked.

Without a secondary array or site you will not have anything to restore your backups to - unless and until Dell support repairs or replaces the system. This could lead to unacceptable downtime, so plan accordingly. Support is probably lying to you.

Dropped traffic on large backups is a very common problem that can be caused by a dozen environmental and configuration issues, and firmware is almost never the culprit. Upgrade because you're on obsolete code with known issues, but unless there is some sort of evidence that this problem is one of the known issues, expect to have to continue working on it. FWIW, dropped packets and high latency during large sequential reads are commonly seen when you're saturating the storage's front-end ports. If you are bumping up against line rate during backups, you will sometimes see the default 'flow control' mechanism of 'drop packets' cause this.

Generally, this isn't an issue except on low-end 1Gb/s switches. So if you have this kind of flexibility, you could hide this problem or shorten your window by splitting that windows volume into two, one per controller, and having the OS stripe them into a single drive letter. Assuming the windows OS is what's driving the backup, that'll double your throughput by using both controllers' port(s). The fact that your switches are SAN only is a step in the right direction, but helps mostly in preventing non-storage traffic from stepping on storage traffic. Luckily, that makes fixing this easier.

I found a on Dell's website detailing settings specific to iSCSI- can you check your switches and see if you have any glaring discrepancies? Specifically flow control, but possibly also QoS. Have you made sure that the problem is not in the iSCSI infrastructure? I had a problem very similar to yours a few years ago and it turned out to be a problem with the iSCSI switch configuration (blame the network joke here) Other than that I've only done F/W on PS6000 and PS6100 arrays and every time I've done it I've tried to shut down as many systems that are accessing the array as possible. Shut down running VMs, shut down iSCSI connected hosts. We have always given our users 2 weeks notice and we try to migrate our VMs to a different cluster (but that's not always possible) If you've got dell on board with this then you're in good hands. Be sure that you download all your update packages well before hand and have any multi-pathing extensions ready to be installed once the array gets patched.

Knoppix Boot Only Isotretinoin. We have 4Gb ports of interconnect between the two, but whether they are configured properly is another question. I'll see if I can't figure it out, but I'm pretty weak on the powerconnect CLI.

After re-reading the docs, it said to make sure flow control is enabled on the NICs and switches. I remember enabling it on the switches, but I found that it wasn't enabled on the iSCSI vNIC on our 2008 instance. I've enabled it there, and will see if that makes the difference. Given that the iSCSI drops are from the 2008 initiator only, and I'm not seeing any drops on the ESXi iSCSI ports, this may be the issue.

Make sure the warranty / support on the EqualLogic is active, otherwise you ain't gonna get those firmware updates. Make sure that you read the firmware upgrade progression path in the release notes. Depending on how far back it is, you most likely will to do an incremental upgrade on the firmware to get it to the most current version for that model (v4 ->v4.5 ->v5 ->etc etc).

When you do the firmware upgrade it typically upgrades the passive controller, then makes it active, then upgrades the other one and then confirms the upgrade on both. I've done it live without issues, but make sure that there is very little traffic or that you are OK with having whatever is attached have a hiccup. Also check to make sure that best practices on iSCSI configuration for your volumes/servers connected to the array. I would just assume that whoever had it before didn't do it right and go over all the details yourself to make sure.

We have EqualLogic PS6210X units, the only real gotchas are there will likely be a quick drop in iSCSI traffic when the controller reboots - if your iSCSI time out values are set high enough in ESXi this shouldn't be a problem - but you should plan for downtime either way to play it safe. The firmware process will upgrade primary controller >reboot that controller and then update the secondary controller >reboot that controller. If you have any hosts connected to said controller thats being updated thats where your traffic drops will be. I'm not sure what FW versions the PS4000 supports but try to run the latest ver 7 release there are some nasty bugs in some of the last versions of 6 / early versions of 7 that cause unexplained controller reboots / freezes also many security holes have been patched like Shellshock. 7.1.2 is the most recent firmware, and is supported on the PS4000, but multiball will likely have to do several upgrades if the array has not been upgraded in a long time. See 'Table 7: Supported Firmware Upgrade Paths' in the 'Updating Firmware for Dell EqualLogic' doc that comes with each firmware - found on the firmware download page. The PowerConnect 5424 are not a great switch, and likely the source of the dropped packets.

Given that you have a valid support contract, use it, call support, and push for tier 3 support 'due to on-going performance issues during backup window'. Before you do that though, install SAN HQ, and upgrade the firmware to the latest as you are planning. Check the 'PS Series Firmware Compatibility with EqualLogic Products' (support login needed) to see if upgrading the firmware will need anything else upgraded.