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.
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.
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.
Also from the SANscreen user interface, we could set global policies (enforcing how SAN, Fibre Channel and Zoning path-violations are determined) or activate and configure VM host virtualization rules, setting profiles that could be used later. We could also track SAN vulnerabilities (usually these amount to things such as incorrect SAN port, zone or volume assignment mistakes) and see these visually in a topology graphical view.
The graphical view can represent SAN paths, switches, zones, storage arrays, hosts, recently changed devices, as well as generic (and perhaps unidentified) devices. We tracked our VM hosts and VM instances using SANscreen Performance Chart and Load Analyzer to capture the activity of the individual devices and device mappings within the SAN.
Onaro makes strong use of its GUI and gives a SAN-centric view of an enterprise VM and/or server-based view of the world. Its detail factor is high, as is its ability to discern both problems and vulnerabilities. Better still, we like its planning and change modeling capabilities. Its online help guides are very helpful. More helpful still is that Onaro installs 100% (including ours) of their products with varying degrees of training.
We were knocked over by SANscreen VMInsight’s features and usefulness for VM-based SAN management. If Onaro could link its user interface to other software administration, management and monitoring packages, the combination would be huge.
nWorks provides Microsoft management link to VMware | Next story: Reflex IPS adds security to your VM life >
