This blog was written by VMware’s own Brock Peterson and is also posted on his personal blog here. Brock is a Cloud Solutions Architect in the Cloud Management Business Unit and an avid Packer fan.
For years, the vRealize True Visibility Suite management pack for Dell EMC VMAX supported VMAX3 and VMAX AFA arrays. It now supports PowerMax as well! Collecting data from Unisphere for both platforms, it looks like this.
The adapter connects directly to the Unisphere REST API (8.1+) over HTTPS. Different levels of security can be configured in the adapter via Advanced Settings. Configuration documentation found here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vRealize-True-Visibility-Suite/1.0/dell-emc-vmax/GUID-BFEE37FC-AAE1-4A50-8C3E-9E1911BCCD0B.html
Once objects and metrics have been captured, relationships between VMAX/ PMAX Volumes to Datastores running on them are established.
In this case, Volume FFF7F is the Dell EMC VMAX Volume and wdc-08-vc20c01-vsan is the vSphere Datastore. The little green check circles indicate the Health of each object, in this case both are healthy.
One can expand this view to show VMs and ESXi Hosts running on that Datastore and up level objects from the VMAX Volume: Storage Groups, Masking Views, and Arrays.
This allows the user to trace the path from Datastore to Array and everything in between, ultimately giving them the ability to troubleshoot from VM to Storage Array.
The management pack contains:
- 9 Dashboards
- 40 Views
- 7 Reports
- 13 Objects
- 500+ Metrics
- 80+ Alerts
The dashboards, views, and reports are straight forward. The Overview dashboard is quite rich with multiple configurations available for each object/widget.
There are 13 objects captured by the new Dell EMC PowerMax and VMAX adapter: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vRealize-True-Visibility-Suite/1.0/dell-emc-vmax/GUID-438DF2D1-B2BA-4538-9335-DB329C65BB11.html
There are 80+ UniSphere generated Alerts the adapter imports into vRealize Operations and over 500+ metrics: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vRealize-True-Visibility-Suite/1.0/dell-emc-vmax/GUID-F37E3047-11F1-4B3E-81D3-9C3A636C0F3F.html
