Last week we released a new version of the popular vRealize Operations Management Pack for Storage Devices which allows you to monitor your third-party storage devices and Fibre Channel network. This provides full visibility to the storage tier for virtual machine and application performance and availability monitoring. If you are familiar with previous versions of this management pack, you are going to be pleased with the improvements in this release.
Supported Environments
This release is supported with vRealize Operations versions 6.6.1, 6.7 and 7.0. If you are using a previous version of the management pack, be aware that this version is not an upgrade. We recommend removing the old management pack because the new adapters do not collect the same metrics and will show duplicate objects in your vRealize Operations inventory.
vSphere version 6.0 and later are required for storage device visibility and be aware that ports 5988 (HTTP) and 5989 (HTTPS) are required for CIM communications between vRealize Operations, vCenter Server and the CIM servers.
Fibre Channel SANs managed using Cisco Data Center Network Manager and Brocade Network Advisor are required for Cisco MDS and Brocade FC switches respectively.
Host to Storage Network to Array
First and most notably, this new version provides complete end-to-end coverage from ESXi hosts to most enterprise storage arrays including the Fibre Channel networks that connect them. You read that correctly, we are giving you the best visibility from virtual-to-physical including Fibre Channel ports, key Fibre Channel performance indicators and automatic mapping of relationships from port to physical disk. In fact, there’s a new “Troubleshoot Fabric” dashboard provided out of the box as you can see in this screen shot.
Through Common Information Model (CIM) protocols, important Fibre Channel metrics such as buffer-to-buffer credits, frame discards, loss of signal and loss of sync are provided to help you quickly zero in on storage area network issues.
The “Storage Health Overview” dashboard is also a new included feature, providing detailed information for storage arrays, controllers and host bus adapters. It leverages VASA to fetch third-party storage information.
More, Better, Faster
This release introduces a totally rebuilt discovery engine which greatly increases the time to value and provides improved stability for the management pack. Additional alerts are provided to increase visibility and awareness of storage issues, including:
- HBA alerts for latency, IOPs, all paths down, link failure and more
- Fibre Channel switch alerts for high invalid transmission word, switch port issues and others
- Storage controller alerts for LUN capacity, among others
Finally, the management pack allows you to create views and visibility for end-to-end topology from the virtual machines, hosts, datastores, switches and storage controllers as shown in this example dashboard:
If you need full visibility into third-party storage and Fibre Channel SANs, check out the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Storage Devices today!
