The New Delphix 5.2 Management Interface

Posted on by Matt Griffith

Delphix 5.2 Login Screen

Delphix version 5.2 has recently been released and with it a complete new look and feel to the virtualization engine GUI.  Finally the guys at Delphix have completely removed Flash from the front end, a welcome relief, and with it have taken the opportunity to redesign the interface to make it cleaner, more modern and intuitive.  It’s been a long time coming but is it an improvement?

Continue reading “The New Delphix 5.2 Management Interface” →

Jet Stream Reset Vs Undo

Posted on by Matt Griffith

   Vs    

Jet Stream has some great features for the end user (data consumer), one of which is the ability to undo the last operation in certain situations.  There’s also a reset button on the main toolbar which, if I’m honest, I haven’t really had much call for and do wonder if anyone actually uses.

Here I want to explain the difference between the two features and ensure you don’t misunderstand them and leave your environment in a state you didn’t intend, which I’ve seen happen before.

Continue reading “Jet Stream Reset Vs Undo” →

Faults – Ignore or Resolve

Posted on by Matt Griffith

Faults in the Delphix virtualisation engine are automatically generated when a problem occurs and generally mean something is broken. They will be categorised as WARNING or CRITICAL and require some human intervention to fix.

When a fault occurs the GUI will show a red ‘Fault’ link in the top right part of the screen.

Clicking the link will open a small window where you can browse each active fault and further Ignore or Resolve them, or even Mark All Resolved. But when should you ignore a fault, when should you resolve a fault and when should you resolve ALL the faults, and what are you actually doing by ignoring and resolving?

Continue reading “Faults – Ignore or Resolve” →

Support Bundle Download

Posted on by Matt Griffith

I experienced a situation (several times) a while back with the GUI in the virtualisation engine where it became unresponsive and would eventually die in the browser.  The symptoms occurred when the engine was reclaiming a large amount of space after removing some objects, mainly large dSources.  Obviously I wanted to get to the bottom of why it was happening so raised a support ticket, however, as I’m sure you know, the first thing you do after raising a ticket with Delphix Support is to generate and upload a support bundle.  You’ve probably guessed the problem here… how can I generate a support bundle when the GUI isn’t working?

Continue reading “Support Bundle Download” →

SQL Server Hooks

Posted on by Matt Griffith

provision hook screen

For those of you using Delphix with Oracle you’ve probably already had some exposure to Hooks; when you create a VDB via the GUI you always hit a hook screen during the provision process. I don’t intend to explain in detail what hooks are in this post but I will say they can be extremely useful to implement specific requirements where Delphix does not support them natively. A good example for Oracle is database account passwords. Lets take a quick look at what I mean.

Your non-prod VDB is most likely a copy from production and the passwords for all accounts will be identical to those in production. These passwords, especially for privileged accounts, will be held in a password repository where you can retrieve them when required (some production incident or planned change) and, in the case of password repositories that can automatically control accounts, will be changed to some random password at the end of a predefined time frame, thus ensuring no one can gain privileged access to the database unless authorised.

So the scenario is we now have a VDB, lets assume it is a Jet Stream container VDB to be consumed by a developer, with account passwords unknown. The obvious way around this is for the Dev to contact the DBA and ask them to change the password for all the accounts the Dev needs to do their job. Well that sounds like manual labour to me! Cue Delphix Hooks…

Just like in the physical world, if we were automating the refresh of dev databases, we can write a short shell script that can update these accounts changing the password to something known. Hooks have several trigger points (Pre-Refresh, Post-Refresh, Pre-Start, Post-Start to name a few) that gives us the ability for this use case to extract the existing passwords (hashed obviously) from the VDB prior to refresh and then reset the accounts to this password after the refresh.

Well this all sounds very useful and you can probably think of many great uses for hooks but if you are working with SQL Server you’re out of luck… well actually, not quite.

Continue reading “SQL Server Hooks” →