Well I knew this day would come eventually, we had run out of space on this HP MSA. I knew going into this small project but this is the direction that the team took. So we purchased another 2 TB of space and I needed to add it to the configuration. We ended up buying 6 450 GB SATA disks to use in the MSA 2312sa unit. The drives were used to create one vDisk with just over 2 TB of usable space that was split up into 2 Datastores in VMware.

The configuration was a breeze just like the initial setup. The disks were placed evenly across the disk shelves and appeared into the console as expected. A couple of clicks later I had a vDisk setup and then created to volumes and assigned them to my hosts once I had created the Datastores from the first Host.

If you need to know more about how to setup these you can read my initial post on how to setup a HP MSA 2300 series array here.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status for 2012 & 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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This is something that I have to do on Windows boxes all the time, but less on our ESX boxes. In the past we used to just run the vm-support to collect the support logs and turn those over to the storage team. They no longer are happy with those and since EMC now has a grab that supports both vSphere and VI3.5 it’s hard to deny them now. In case you do not know what a grab is, it’s a log collection utility that will provide the storage admin with all of the details about WWN’s, paths and which LUN’s a host can see. They can use this for planning upgrades and troubleshooting issues.

First thing you will need to do is to download the proper EMC grab version to support your hosts. At the time of writing this its a version 1.2.1 and is supports both ESX 3 and 4. Proceed on over to http://powerlink.emc.com and download it from the support programs area.

Once you have the file you will need to upload it to your host with something like WinSCP. I always upload it into the /tmp folder and unzip it there. It will create a folder called “emcgrab”. You can use the following command to do the unzip in case your not familiar with what to do.

tar -xvf emcgrab_ESX_vSphere_v.1.2.1.tar

Next thing is to move into the emcgrab directory that was created. From within there you will need to execute the following command. If you read the help file included in the directory it will explain some options to supress some annoying confirmation screens about the licensing and such.

./emcgrab.sh -nomsg

Once the program starts to run depending on the options you used it will prompt you to confirm and read the licensing. After you pass that part it will ask you a string of questions about your contact details and some questions about your environment. These are not necessary to complete it you are using these grabs in house. If you plan on sending these to EMC then I would advise to fill them out.

Once the script completes it will ask you if you want to run vm-support to collect the VMware support logs along with the EMCgrabs. This is up to you, if you have a need for them go ahead. Once the script finished it will place the zipped up file in the Output folder and you can pull off the file with WinSCP.

In closing it’s not necessary to be running Powerpath on your hosts to collect these grabs.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status for 2012 & 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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