Handy naviseccli Commands

I have been meaning to document this for ages.  I often find myself supporting clients who are located on the other side of a horribly slow WAN / VPN / 2 Cans and a piece of string link.  Slow as in even Navisphere Express times out in the web browser.  That’s when a ninja-admin such as myself whips out his command-line fu.  All commands below are to be entered on a single line and substitute %username% and %password%

Physical Container-Front End Ports Speeds

naviseccli –h <ip address> port –list -sfpstate
naviseccli –h <ip address> –set sp a –portid 0 2
naviseccli –h <ip address> backendbus –get –speeds 0

SP cache details
naviseccli -scope 0 -user %username% –password %password% -address <ip address> getcache

Get all the details of the LUN’s on the array
naviseccli -scope 0 -user %username% –password %password% -address <ip address> getlun

Review IO Ports on an array
naviseccli -h <ip address> -user %username% –password %password% -scope 0 ioportconfig -list |more

All details from the Array
naviseccli -scope 0 -user %username% -password %password%-address <ip address> getall

SP Reboot and Shutdown GUI
naviseccli –h <ip address> rebootsp
naviseccli –h <ip address> resetandhold

Apart from being faster than the GUI, knowing the naviseccli commands also allows you to incorporate them in scripts, pipe the output etc.  In other words it’s a very nice string to have in your bow!

Hyper-V 3.0 is full of win!

There has been a lot of movement in the virtualization space recently, what with the release of vSphere 5 and Microsoft giving us a sneak peek at the upcoming Hyper-V 3.0.  All in all it seems that Hyper-V is a very rapidly maturing product, and Microsoft is adding the features and scalability so craved by enterprises.  Indeed, it also appears that they are pulling ahead of vSphere in certain areas.

The table below highlights some key performance maximums

	vSphere 5	Hyper-V 3
Max Nodes per Cluster	32	63
Max VMs per Cluster	3000	4000
Max CPUs per VM	32	32
Max RAM per VM	1 TB	512 GB
Max VM Disk Size	2 TB	12 TB
Max Processor Cores per Host	160	160
Max RAM per Host	2 TB	2 TB

In addition to that Hyper-V 3.0 will also bring the following to the table:

• Live storage migration
• This allows you to move you VHDs to another volume whilst the VM is online.  The volume need not reside on shared storage
• Hyper-V Replica
• This allow replication via LAN, for incredibly easy and cost-efficient DR
• Native NIC teaming support in Windows Server 8
• Storage De-Duplication
• Offloaded Date Transfer (ODX), which basically offloads the grunt storage work to an ODX-enabled SAN
• Virtualization-Aware Domain Controllers
• You now can now make and revert to snapshots of a virtualized domain controller
• Domain controllers running as a VM can also be cloned

This is some of the more important features Hyper-V 3.0 has to offer.  It is quickly turning into a very viable and cost-effective alternative to vSphere.