A Great Monitoring Solution for Storage, Backups and Virtual Infrastructure
I recently went on a scavenger hunt looking for a simple Storage Resource Management tool that could help one of our customers easily monitor their storage utilization across multiple SAN/NAS devices and multiple hosts. I wanted something that would make it easy for them to see how much storage is available and how much has been consumed. If the product was also capable of offering historical trending and analysis then even better, but more than anything else I was looking for SIMPLE and USEFUL.
This customer had 2 Clariion CX4’s, multiple VMWare Hosts and an EMC Celerra. After much digging, I only found 2 products that could really do what I was looking for, EMC Control Center and Tek-Tools Profiler. There were other products out there, but most of them were no longer being supported or did not have the functionality I was looking for . I decided to take a look at Tek-Tools Profiler and I have been very impressed. I still plan to install Control Center in our lab, but I’ll save that for another day. Control Center has a different set of features than Profiler and for the sake of what I needed, Profiler was a perfect fit. I had a demo copy of Profiler installed and running and reporting on both Clariion and Celerra’s in our lab environment in less than an hour. I installed it on a Windows 2003 virtual machine. to query our EMC SAN, I had to install and configure the EMC SMI-S provider, but this only took about 10 minutes to download and install and configure. I had to turn on detailed logging in Navisphere in order for Profiler to collect performance data. For monitoring our VMWare Virtual Infrastructure, I just had to give profiler a read-only username and password to Virtual Center. The overall setup was very easy and the one or two questions I had were quickly answered by a Tek-tools sales rep.
I found 2 wonderful extra benefits of storage profiler that I wasn’t even looking for. One, it included a very nice VMWare performance and storage monitoring dashboard, and two, it offered historical performance analysis of my arrays. There were many other benefits but those two benefits were a surprise that I was not expecting.
I can’t even begin to touch on all of the benefits of Profiler. So since I’m a visual learner, I’ll share a quick little video of what the interface of Profiler looks like in our lab.
Profiler was setup to monitor our ESX environment and our Clariion CX3-10 and our Celerra NAS gateway. I also have it monitoring information on our Cisco MDS 9124 FC switches. Profiler supports monitoring all sorts of different devices, read more about it at http://www.tek-tools.com
Here is a quick screencast of Profiler in our lab environment. I am whispering on this screencast because my kids are asleep, actually, the whole house is asleep. Enjoy.
http://screencast.com/t/7Nd1fZcy
In the end, after demonstrating this solution to our customer, they decided to purchase it and install it in their environment. I am sure this product will pay for itself quickly because of the insight it can give an administrator into the details of the storage and virtualization infrastructure. This solution is not the end-all be-all of monitoring solutions, but for the purpose for which it was built, it is definitely best of breed. Congratulations Tek-Tools on creating a great product and for your dedication to continually improving this product and remaining focused.
