SMcli snippet: creating new logical drives

In an earlier post I outlined the CLI for the DS3000/4000/5000 and I wrapped up saying how I should post up snippets of SMcli. So heres the first of interesting snippets that I come across.

This script creates a new logical drive using the create logicalDrive command in the free space of a array. Now shucks, I dont know the original author of this script so cant give credit, do appriciate if anyone is able to point me to the original source

Show “Create RAID 5 Logical Drive WIN_7 on existing Array 1”;
//Create logicalDrive on array created by the create logicalDrive drives command
//Note: For arrays that use all available capacity, the last logicalDrive on the group is created using all remaining capacity by omitting the capacity=logicalDrive creation parameter
create logicalDrive array=1 RAIDLevel=5 userLabel=”7” owner=A segmentSize=16 readAheadMulitiplier=256 capacity=2GB;
show “Setting additional attributes for logicalDrive WIN_7”; //Configuration settings that cannot be set during logicalDrive creation
set logicalDrive[“WIN_7”] cacheFlushModifier=10;
set logicalDrive[“WIN_7”] cacheWithoutBatteryEnabled=false;
set logicalDrive[“WIN_7”] mirrorEnabled=true; set logicalDrive[“WIN_7”] readCacheEnabled=true;
set logicalDrive[“WIN_7”] writeCacheEnabled=true;
set logicalDrive[“WIN_7”] mediaScanEnabled=false;
set logicalDrive[“WIN_7”] redundancyCheckEnabled=false;
set logicalDrive[“WIN_7”] modificationPriority=high;


Remember as with anything- staging envrionment before production

Commandline into a DS box

The more I explore the more I like the Storage management application for IBM’s DS 3000/4000/5000

family of products. Not only is it feature rich – it is straight forward and no nonsense … giving good visuals of the storage subsystem, right down to the individual spindles themselves. (Installing the software package etc is a straightforward affair and there are several howtos online) What I want to bring to attention is the CommandLine Interface (and Script Editor) support. Its brilliant!

The basic syntax is straightforward
command parameter;

So a basic command would take the form:

show allDriveChannels stats;
This is the equvalent of performing Advanced -> Troubleshooting -> Drive Channels on the GUI.

So as in most scripting approaches, there are two modes:
1) an interactive mode of execution
2) batch file mode of execution

How to run interactively
1) Before running a command, you need to establish a connection to the subsystems. This is done by
SMcli <IP of controller 1> <IP of controller 2>
If you are managing in-band then you will need to enter the IP address of the ‘managing host’. The command is pretty flexible and will accept a ‘user-supplied name’ or hostname or the WWN of the subsystem
2) Script away
3) no really, there’s no step 3

Note that hitting Ctrl-C will exit interactive mode and take you back to your prompt.

If you want to run a single line, without entering and breaking out of interactive mode then inovking a command  using the -c switch allows a command to execute immediately – that is, executes the specified command and returns to the OS command prompt. For example:

SMcli <IP of controller 1> <IP of controller 2> -c "<command>;"

Note the quotes around the command, and the semicolon.

Creating Batch Files
Storage manager comes with its own script editor, that you can launch by navigating to Tools -> Execute Script. However you can use any editor that you are familiar with to create a batchfile. My editor of choice is vim (i wonder if its worth it writing a syntax highlighter).

SMcli <IP of controller 1> <IP of controller 2> -f script.scr

So here, SMCli verifies the filelocation and the syntax of the commands. Commands in the batch file are executed one at a time and SMCli returns to the prompt after all commands are executed. If you are under windows then ensure that SMclient path is in the system envrionment settings.

Error reporting
Description of errors are written directly to the commandline buffer with a set return code. Syntax errors are quite helpful with additional information being echo’ed.
An exception however is captured and dumped to a file (located in client\data\excprpt.txt) usually before the end of execution.

Verification
Whats quite neat when using the script editor is that it allows you to run in a mode to simply verify syntax of the batch file without executing the script itself. Select Tools ->Verify Syntax. Here the script editor engine simply parses the statements in the scriptfile and simply verifies that the correct syntax is used. Syntax errors are reported with line numbers on the ‘output view’.

Well there are several arguments for both using a GUI and CLI … the good thing with the DS Storage Manager is that you have the option for either, depending on how workflows and change management are formalised in your organisation. Perhaps I should look at writing a few scripts and posting them up for public consumption.

Exchanging Technology Leadership

The vastness that is IBM is made smaller by events that encourage the exchange of ideas and concepts. The ‘Technical Leadership Exchange’ is one such event. This is an event as its name suggests is predominantly for technology leaders to meet and exchange ideas and novel concepts in their regions. So you can imagine how stoked I was when I received a nomination to attend! (thanks STG management team!).

The event ran roughly over the first week of August and incorporated sessions from all parts of the IBM technology spectrum.  Sessions ran from early morning till late afternoon and the demonstration area incorporated concepts along the lines of ‘i-was-mucking-around-and look-what-i-discovered-to-have-real-value’. On a personal level I found it refreshing to see how the Corporation encourages innovation ranging from the ’small and quirky’ to the ‘theres a better way to do something we’ve always been doing’. I also enjoyed thoroughly, the very candid sessions we had with senior WorldWide technology leaders and Distinguished Engineers.

All in all, this conference was of a different nature to IBM internal conferences I have previously attended. While it didnt quite have the glam of larger conferences, it was very rich in content and community – exactly what a purist technical conference should be On the flight back home to New Zealand, I was bright eyed and wondering if in 2009 I would be sufficiently established in a subject with considerable susbtance to present to my peers.

IBM Forum on a roll

This year’s IBM Forum has been well published and is getting a fair exposure via several kiwi blogs as well. IBM NZ’s marketing team has been hard at work planning and executing Forum activities for several months and today things are being put in place … quite literally. The IBM team is at the Michael Fowler Center in Wellington coordinating and trying to organise the chaos that seems to exist before any given major event in any universe.

The six PODs that im helping in are still being assembled and not wanting to get in the way at this stage, ive tucked myself near where the IBM technologies are stored for the moment and writing. There is a high expectation of quality from guests at any IBM event so fingers crossed the software/hardware setup for the demonstrations will go smoothly without any scratching of my head with exclamations of ‘it worked beautifully in the lab’.

Visit the published agenda for IBM Forum this year. There are some world class speakers (both from NZ businesses and from the IBM worldwide team) and some scintillating topics. I could go on, but best that you visit at either Welligton [11/08], Auckland [14/08] or Christchurch [19/08].

I shall try to keep my tweets updated and will publish the SecondLife SURL shortly. Right now I think I should go and lend a hand!

Those of you eager for a post from my experience at the IBM internal ‘Technical Leadership Exchange’ I apologise but you will have to wait as there is a mountain of work for me to climb before I am able to do some writing.

Air time

Did any of you manage to catch IBM on New Zealand TV this morning? IBM was on both the Breakfast Show on TVone and Sunrise on TV3. When was the last time you remember IBM NZ having this much tv air time!

The Sunrise program was part of a story about a CEO study conducted by Unlimited magazine. Im told that the magazine will be on news stands this week! The Breakfast show I find interesting at it debuted IBM NZ’s new Business Insight feature. Here’s an excerpt from the IBM website on what Business Insight is all about:

Business Insight will bring you the stories of innovative companies, innovative solutions and innovative examples to inspire you to reach further, to take on the world and then to share your stories of success.
Innovation is the key to growth and prosperity. Business Insight provides real examples of real New Zealand companies that have prospered through innovation. Find out from the people at the top what drove them, what they did and why it worked. Updated regularly with new examples of the many forms of innovation. Read the articles, view the video and learn from the innovations and the innovators.

If you missed these screenings, not to worry IBM will be on TV again!

6:50am Wednesday (30th July) on TV1 and again at 10:50pm (31st July) on TV1.You could always sign up for updates if you’d like.

Lights. Camera. Action!

Sense my SQL

Since ReleaseCandidate 0 was made available, there have been many reviews of Microsoft’s SQL 2008. One of the most interesting changes is the inclusion of Intellisense in the SQL Server Management Studio! This means that the rich features that have been available within Visual Studio for the dot net family of languages is now at the disposal of DBAs. So, variables that are declared are visible as well as T-SQL syntax (not to mention collapsible code regions). 

I wonder how DB2 integrated in Visual Studio will look’and’feel.

Those of you on my mailing list (I do plan on depreciating the mailing list at some point) were notified when Hyper-V was made RTM. Reading the Hardware Software requirements for SQL 2008 on TechNet we can see that SQL2008 is officially supported on Hyper-V. ‘Click to Run’. Microsoft is also making available the “Introducing SQL Server 2008″ book by the Microsoft Press, as a free eBook.

Ooh Intellisense for writing T-SQL yes my simple mind is rotted!

Textism

LaTeX is quite simply amazing. Ever since I was introduced to it ive been passionate in my LaTeX use and this lead to me being very intrigued in the various text formatting syntaxes that are used, especially by wikis to generate HTML.

Textile formatting for some tacit reason has been my favorite for some time. (Several wikis and online publishing systems use varying methods of text formatting … if you are not familiar with using text formatting to generate html, have a play with the online textile tool).

Textile also seems to be the preferred text formatting syntax in the Ruby world. The beautiful module for Ruby – RedCloth perhaps is a large reason for the popularity of Textile. RedCloth is simply a Ruby library for converting Textile into HTML.

Not so long ago RedCloth 4.0 was released!

You can read all about the enhancements and added functionality in the changelog, what has me excited is that this is the first major release for sometime. Let me clarify that. Rubyforge shows the 4.0.0 update released with a timestamp 2008-07-21 16:38. The previous version 3.0.4 has a timestamp of 2005-09-15 13:23. That’s approximately three years!

This means that over the last three years, several Ruby applications have been using RedCloth with minimal changes to the RedCloth module. How fantastic! Yes my fellow codes, that is indeed pretty fantastic.

RedCloth is available as a RubyGem so you can simply run

sudo gem install RedCloth

Note that the above syntax requires RedCloth to be typed in CamelCase, not lowercase.

Or if you are not using RubyGems then you can download the tarball and install it as such:

ruby install.rb config
ruby install.rb setup
sudo ruby install.rb install

You could also compile from source although I have not attempted this myself you are able to from the git repository.

git clone git://github.com/jgarber/redcloth.git
cd redcloth
rake install

Looking at the changelog three things stoodout for me:
Markdown support has been removed.
x40 times faster than the previous version.
But what I am most excited about is the line ‘Rudimentary support for LaTeX is built in’. This just keeps getting better!

Really there is simply nothing better than LaTeX when it comes to separating content from presentation.

Size up the DACstore

Lets be very clear – the DACstore area of the disk drives in the DS4000 family is only 512MB. That’s it! A flat amount. It does not increase as the drive capacity increases, it is not a percentage of the total capacity of the drive. It is simply 512MB in total. The size of the DACstore on firmware level V7.10 remains at the same 512MB size.

For those of you wondering, the DACstore is a (512MB) reservation on the physical drives in a DS4000 subsystem that holds information about the DS4000 configuration. Here they are listed below (as found in the ‘IBM System Storage DS4000 and Storage Manager’ book pg134):

• Drive state and status
• WWN of the DS4000 controller (A or B) behind which the disk resides 
• Logical drives contained on the disk 
• Failed drive information 
• Global Hot Spare state/status 
• Storage subsystem identifier (SAI or SA Identifier) 
• SAFE Premium Feature Identifier (SAFE ID) 
• Storage subsystem password
• Media scan rate 
• Cache configuration of the storage subsystem 
• Storage user label 
• MEL logs 
• LUN mappings, host types, and so on. 
• Copy of the controller NVSRAM

So, this information is stored on every physical drive in a DS4000 subsystem (including drives in any expansions) all in the 512MB space.

This lends to some inherent advantages that tend to be quite unique to the DS4000 family. For example, drives can be rearranged within the subsystem at a very low risk. What I find very fascinating is the ability for all DS4000 subsystems to recognise both configuration and data in drives from other DS4000s. That’s right, you guessed it … upgrades or migrations with data intact.

Now because I am paranoid when it comes to data, please consult your friendly IBM certified specialist before you play any advanced game of checkers with your drives.

32 into 64

Recently there was some discussion around the memory that is addressable in a Windows environment. In fact there is varying opinion on the configuration options for 32-bit windows systems. I thought I would add to that pool.

In very (very) simple theoretical terms 32-bit systems only have 32-bits of data to work with resulting in them being able to address only up to 4 GB of memory. However a 64-bit system could theoretically address up to 16 exabytes of memory.

So why then are there different configuration options for 32bit windows systems and not that many for 64bit windows systems? Lets take an all too typical example – When fitted with 4GB of RAM why then in 32bit Windows on an x86 architecture one is able to see say only 3.5GB?

Although most of the address space on your Windows Memory Manager is filled with RAM a good amount of it will be used by memory mapped devices. Booting with the Physical Address Extension (/PAE / NOPAE) switch allows the processor to access the memory beyond this boundary. The post on Chad Boyd’s SQL stuff gives a far more in depth discussion of PAE than I could. Microsoft’s PAE knowledge base gives a table listing the maximum memory support for a few different windows OS with PAE turned on.

Of course applications complied under dotNet 2.0 (and newer) with the AnyCPU switch set to true dont really need to worry too much about the underlying hardware do they

Visual Studio and IBM

The 2008 tour of Tech Ed has kicked off and there is a lot of interest particularly in the Tech Ed North America keynote by Bill Gates, both for the subject matter and that this will be his last Tech Ed year before he retires. In the press release he is quoted:

“When I think back on the early days of development when we were all programming in DOS, and then take a look at what we can do now with technologies like the .NET Framework, it simply amazes me how far we’ve come,” Gates said. “I started out as a developer and that’s what I remain at heart, so I have a personal interest in the future of the field. I am confident that the path we are laying out today will serve you well into the future.”

Microsoft also made several announcements at this Orlando event, of particular interest was the technical collaboration with IBM.

An alliance with IBM that will further simplify application development for enterprise teams working in heterogeneous environments. IBM and Microsoft have agreed to work together to integrate IBM DB2 database access with Visual Studio Team System Database Edition.

The image in this post is of Bill Gates receiving a life time subscription to Xbox live for use after his retirement from a virtual Steve Ballmer embodied in a robot. Pretty niffty. I also hear that Tech Ed New Zealand was sold out in about three weeks with tickets gone by end of May, very cool.