Onaro's tool gives SAN-centric view of virtual server storage needs

Onaro's SANscreen VMInsight software monitors, tracks and manages VM host hardware and logical hosted VM operating system instances connected to enterprise-sized heterogeneous storage-area network fabrics. It acts as the conduit for performance metrics to flow up into the larger Onaro SAN monitoring and management application called SANscreen. Overall, Onaro's comprehensive SAN-centric view of VM infrastructure is highly detailed — but from the consolidated and virtualized storage perspective.

It's a strong candidate for any organization planning to increase the number of its VMs and enlarge its SAN infrastructure because it orchestrates VMware server needs with storage pool availability across the SAN. Network Appliance recently completed its acquisition of Onaro.

Our tests showed that Onaro's product performs a highly detailed analysis of the SAN fabrics, providing details on which hardware servers use which parts of a SAN, SAN switches, SAN zones and the logical to physical storage tables, and a great topological map.

VMInsight then links this SAN data with information from VMware's VirtualCenter with detailed results. VM servers that need more storage can be analyzed from a performance and use perspective rapidly and visually with the help of VMInsight's well-designed, Java-based GUI. It's then up to system managers to use SANscreen's planning and migration tools to make changes in labeling, destinations, zoning, masking and other SAN changes to accommodate the VM servers' processes.

Click to see: Net results

A second compelling reason for the SANscreen VMInsight combination is that it can analyze complex SAN fabrics and provide visual topological maps that graphically show the fabric's paths, as well as errors or oddities in the SAN fabrics paths and configuration. SANscreen tests these pathways as well, then characterizes connectivity problems with a visual topology map (with drill down to errors or problems that it's found).

Installation puts VMInsight on a Windows XP SP2+ host. Onaro installs MySQL on this host, and a process then links to VMware's VirtualCenter. And therein lies the biggest drawback of VMInsight: It works only with VMware ESX and only with Fibre Channel SANs through VMware's VirtualCenter and ignores other VM platforms and iSCSI storage connections. Onaro hints of additional VM hosts and iSCSI interface connectivity later in 2008.

SANscreen discovers everything on a SAN, except the filing system used on a target storage device, a small limitation, really. It tracks which hosts talk through what switch fabric in which zones to what storage devices. Performance data such as traffic rates and SNMP data pinpointing things like switch errors, unavailable routes and zone mismatches for the monitored SAN fabrics are also kept in Onaro's database for review and reports, and purged at regular static intervals.

The user interface of SANscreen reports 'Daily Violations' (SAN misconfiguration or potential problems) and tracks 'Daily Changes' as reported by VMware's VirtualCenter or VMInsight's view of SAN changes. As an example, if a VM of Windows 2003 Server is disconnected from one SAN disk target (and associated routing through SAN switch fabrics and zones) to another location, it shows in Daily Changes list. If these changes cause a problem, such as duplicate routing through a SAN switch, this fact was shown in the Daily Violations list.