This document discusses how ViPR SRM can provide advanced monitoring and reporting for VPLEX environments. It highlights key capabilities like application to infrastructure mapping, performance trending and reporting, utilization optimization, storage configuration management, application chargeback, storage and capacity trending, and SLA achievement reporting. ViPR SRM provides visibility that leads to insights and optimization of VPLEX environments.
This presentation is intended for customers considering ViPR SRM for monitoring and reporting in VPLEX environments. It provides an overview common challenges when managing a VPLEX infrastructure and key ViPR SRM Use cases that address these challenges.
Rapid data growth is introducing new operational challenges for IT:
Applications are becoming more complex and interconnected while at the same time consuming ever more storage. The ability to understand and visualize these storage service dependencies and cost drivers is critical to ensuring service levels and controlling costs.
With increased costs, line of business managers are demanding cost-transparency from the IT organization. However, increasing complexity creates an opaque cost structure. IT needs to understand detailed costs on a per-application basis to align storage investments with business requirements.
Manual reporting processes has made it difficult for organizations to identify wasted storage that can be reclaimed to support new application requirements.
Application performance is ever more important to the business. New classes of applications for mobile devices and the web require consistent, predictable performance. However, performance problems due to increased complexity are becoming more frequent and difficult to troubleshoot.
Identifying compliance with configuration best practice policies has become increasingly difficult resulting in wasted efforts and incidents due to configuration errors.
Growing complexity is driving an increase in the number of SLA Failures and the mean time to prove innocence or identify root cause.
Uncontrolled growth is driving up operational expenses and capital investment requirements.
VPLEX enhances services levels by offering advanced availability, recoverability, and data mobility capabilities. However, it also adds an additional abstraction layer that, without proper management tools, increases complexity making it harder to address these operational challenges.
ViPR SRM enables IT to address the operational challenges of today's multivendor storage environments. It provides end-to-end visualization, analysis, and reporting for VPLEX environments. It also works with EMC ViPR to establish a solid foundation for bridging the gap between your current IT infrastructure and the 3rd platform. Together, these offerings provide you with the tools you need to abstract, pool and automate storage resources for delivering a more agile infrastructure with lower and for predictable costs.
ViPR SRM enables you to:
Understand application to storage dependencies by mapping topology and relationships from form physical or virtual host host, through the switch, VPLEX, and down to the LUN on the array.
Create application chargeback or show back reports to better align the cost of storage services with business requirements.
Analyze capacity consumption and performance trends to improve utilization and optimize resources
Troubleshoot performance problems, analyze performance trends, and create performance reports for key stakeholders.
Monitor compliance with configuration best practices and the EMC support matrix to ensure the environment is always configured right to meet service levels.
Provide line of business stakeholders with reports that demonstrate SLA compliance.
Analyze capacity consumption trends to improve capacity planning and purchasing processes.
Let’s take a look at how ViPR SRM helps perform each of these tasks in a VPLEX environment.
Here is an example of the end to end relationship view in ViPR SRM for VPLEX environment. It allows you to quickly understand the relationship sfrom host to backend storage array. <Click>
You can quickly drill down to see detailed topology views to support troubleshooting or change planning processes.
ViPR SRM also provides detailed reports that show the end-to-end path details in VPLEX environments. In this report, you can see the disk name, the VMDK file, datastore location, datastore type, host device, storage LUN, storage group view, storage system, storage type, VPLEX extent, backend array LUN, backend array type, the service-level defined in ViPR SRM, in the type of device used.
Here’s an example of a performance trending report for VPLEX. ViPR SRM tracks historical performance trends to simplify troubleshooting and change planning processes. Here you can see the average bandwidth, read latency, throughput, and write latency for a VPLEX director over a five week period.
ViPR SRM also helps you quickly identify which VPLEX storage views are generating the highest workloads. ViPR SRM’s TopN Storage View reports show storage views with the highest bandwidth and <CR> IOPS.
Quickly spot performance issues by analyzing latency trends and < CR> VPLEX added latency. This report shows total latency and the VPLEX added latency for a VPLEX director.
Troubleshoot performance issues by analyzing front-end and backend throughput. <CR> Drill down to see average read and write I/O size to analyze the impact on director performance. <CR> See the impact VPLEX caching has on reducing the I/O load placed on backend storage.
You can also analyze performance for each VPLEX virtual volume. Here you can see IOPS, bandwidth and average read and write latency as well as the associated director for a virtual volume. <CR> With a single click, you can drill down into a virtual volume to analyze historical performance trends.
Analyze WAN link latency to understand its impact on performance. Monitor WAN link utilization trends to understand when more WAN capacity will be required.
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ViPR SRM provides detailed end-to-end topology views for VPLEX environments. It allows you to analyze performance from a virtual or physical host, <CR> Hypervisor, <CR> switch, <CR> VPLEX and <<CR> array perspective. This end-to-end visibility enables storage administrators to quickly isolate performance problems across the data path. With ViPR SRM, you gain a visual understanding of the complex relationships that exist in VPLEX environments with the ability to quickly drill down and analyze performance anywhere along the data path to improve service levels and increase productivity.
The ViPR SRM Virtual Dashboard helps you optimize capacity utilization by providing a snapshot of how your virtual storage capacity is being used within your VPLEX environment. Virtual disks in ViPR SRM represent all primary LUN’s masked and mapped to VPLEX whether they have been claimed or not claimed by VPLEX.
The Storage Capacity Presented to Virtual chart on the Virtual Storage Dashboards shows a breakdown of how all of the virtual disk capacity is used. On this chart:
Virtual Disk Used represents the capacity used in all virtual disks to create VPLEX virtual volumes.
Unused Virtual Disks represent capacity of claimed and unclaimed virtual disks that is not being used in a VPLEX extent.
System Resources shows virtual disk capacity used for VPLEX logging extents and metadata.
RAID Overhead displays the overhead for VPLEX RAID-C and mirrored devices.
Free Space on Used Virtual Disks includes all the capacity for free extents, VPLEX devices not used for a virtual volume, and any unusedcapacity on a used virtual disk.
The Free Space on Use Virtual Disk chart shows the breakdown of how the free space on virtual disks is allocated between free devices, free extents, and free space on partially used virtual disks.
The Virtual Volume Usage chart shows virtual volume capacity by type. Distributed Used is the capacity for virtual volumes with backend storage supplied from two clusters. Local Used shows virtual volumes presented by a cluster using local virtual disks. Remote Used shows virtual volumes presented through a cluster that only uses virtual disks from a remote cluster.
ViPR SRM validates compliance with design best practices in VPLEX environments. Configuration violations are displayed in the Breach Reports under Storage Compliance section of the Operations.
ViPR SRM validates both front-end and backend configurations for VPLEX environment. It also validates compliance with the EMC support matrix.
Front-end configuration rules include:
Host port fan in
Path redundancy
Single initiator zoning
OS & multi-pathing SW interoperability
Zone must contain host port/storage port
Masking entry for unmapped volume
Back-end configuration rules include:
Backend path redundancy
Verify logging volume is present
Zone contain host port/storage Port
Storage port fan out
Here’s example of the chargeback/showback capabilities now available in ViPR SRM. ViPR SRM has the ability to detect the underlying service-level of an encapsulated LUN before and after migration to support chargeback reporting. ViPR SRM classifies storage that is not part of encapsulated volume or is classified by ViPR SRM as “Other” (which denotes capacity does not fit within a ViPR SRM service level definition) is categorized as VirtualStorage.
Here’s an example of a capacity trending report in ViPR SRM. This is the Enterprise Capacity Dashboard within ViPR SRM. It shows consumption trends over time to help identify where and when capacity will be required. The Views for Used for Virtual Storage trend line, shown in yellow, details consumption trends for VPLEX virtual storage capacity. This line includes the capacity of all primary LUNs masked and mapped to VPLEX as well as all associated replicas.
ViPR SRM also shows which storage views are consuming the most capacity through the TopN Storage View report
Simple customization is easy to do with ViPR SRM. Let’s say you receive a request from the VP of Operations to pull together a capacity report for all the hosts, datastores, switches and arrays in your environment. Sounds like it could take all day to assemble, right? Well, the good news is it will only take minutes with ViPR SRM. Simply identify the reports you’d like to include in your new custom report and “pin” them to create your own “My View” report. Each time you select a new report to be displayed into My View, it will be added to your “My View” report.
ViPR SRM is extremely flexible and capable of simple and highly customized reporting. For example, you can modify an existing out-of-the-box report quite easily by simply selecting the report while in browse mode. Once you’ve got the report you want to modify, select edit mode to customize it to suit your needs. Browsing and editing reports are all done from the same user interface.
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Most reports offer a number of options to present the data in a variety of report types such as bar or pie charts.
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You can also change the order/position of reports on your dashboard.
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And you can add a variety of formulas to an existing report. Simply select the desired formula and identify the parameters to be used.
Storage Administrators struggle to communicate the value and delivery of storage services to a variety of users and roles. Reporting is typically manual and extremely time consuming. ViPR SRM offers a flexible reporting engine to create a wide variety of reports from the extremely simple to highly customized. Reports can be created and scheduled to run on a regular basis allowing them to be easily shared or Emailed to key stakeholders such as application owners, lines of business or tenants in the case of service providers.
Automating reports for key stakeholders saves storage teams significant time and eliminates manual errors. With better reporting capabilities they are able to communicate the value and performance of their storage services. These are two examples of custom dashboards and reports that were created as part of a sales campaign for a service provider in EMEA. The top dashboard was created for the storage team who needs to view storage utilization across the platinum, gold, silver and bronze storage tiers for all customers. The bottom dashboard highlights the multi-tenant capability, which only allows tenants to view their storage tiers.
ViPR SRM helps you visualize application to storage dependencies for performance analysis and troubleshooting, understand capacity usage and trends for planning, validate configurations to ensure compliance to service levels and automate reporting. With greater visibility and insight, you’re armed with the information needed to optimize your VPLEX environment to improve return on investment.
ViPR SRM also offers an extensible framework to support investments in EMC ViPR Software-defined Storage.
Software Defined Storage is not a means to an end. Rather, it is about a new paradigm where automation and control take center stage. In case of redefining your storage infrastructure, there is a clear first step we think you want to take.
This initial step is an interactive workshop, centered on your vision and goals. The Storage Transformation Workshop provides the best approach in addressing how Software Defined Storage can create agility in your specific environment. To understand your needs better, we spend half a day with your team to review maturity of your existing storage infrastructure, and help you better define your desired state. Using set of analysis tools and questionnaires, EMC looks at your specific applications and the supporting storage environment, identifying the pain points and areas of improvement. Then, over the next week, we deliver a detailed customized report on your path to software-defined storage.
This report includes:
Architecture of your optimum storage service catalog and associated service classification
Roadmap to desired state, doing a gap analysis of your current state and where you can get with software-defined storage.
It also reviews the associated costs, operational needs, risks and costs needed to build your business case to achieve your desired software-defined storage end state
This workshop will help you to improve business agility and provide greater affinity with lines of business your IT organization supports. With this engagement we get you better equipped so you can focus on transformation of IT; and take your game up a notch. This is your first step to automation and control.
(Note: Ask your Advanced Software Division Specialty Sales for more details on this workshop.)