Continuing my coverage of the annual [2010 System Storage Technical University], I participated in the storage free-for-all, which is a long-time tradition, started at SHARE User Group conference, and carried forward to other IT conferences. The free-for-all is a Q&A Panel of experts to allow anyone to ask any question. These are sometimes called "Birds of a Feather" (BOF). Last year, they were called "Meet the Experts", one for mainframe storage, and the other for storage attached to distributed systems. This year, we had two: one focused on Tivoli Storage software, and the second to cover storage hardware. This post provides a recap of the Storage Hardware free-for-all.

The emcee for the event was Scott Drummond. The other experts on the panel included Dan Thompson, Carlos Pratt, Jack Arnold, Jim Blue, Scott Schroder, Ed Baker, Mike Wood, Steve Branch, Randy Arseneau, Tony Abete, Jim Fisher, Scott Wein, Rob Wilson, Jason Auvenshine, Dave Canan, Al Watson, and myself, yours truly, Tony Pearson.

What can I do to improve performance on my DS8100 disk system? It is running a mix of sequential batch processing and my medical application (EPIC). I have 16GB of cache and everything is formatted as RAID-5.

We are familiar with EPIC. It does not "play well with others", so IBM recommends you consider dedicating resources for just the EPIC data. Also consider RAID-10 instead for the EPIC data.

How do I evaluate IBM storage solutions in regards to [PCI-DSS] requirements.

Well, we are not lawyers, and some aspects of the PCI-DSS requirements are outside the storage realm. In March 2010, IBM was named ["Best Security Company"] by SC Magazine, and we have secure storage solutions for both disk and tape systems.  IBM DS8000 and DS5000 series offer Full Disk Encryption (FDE) disk drives.  IBM LTO-4/LTO-5 and TS1120/TS1130 tape drives meet FIPS requirements for encryption.  We will provide you contact information on an encryption expert to address the other parts of your PCI-DSS specific concerns.

My telco will only offer FCIP routing for long-distance disk replication, but my CIO wants to use Fibre Channel routing over CWDM, what do I do?

IBM XIV, DS8000 and DS5000 all support FC-based long distance replication across CWDM. However, if you don't have dark fiber, and your telco won't provide this option, you may need to re-negotiate your options.

My DS4800 sometimes reboots repeatedly, what should I do.

This was a known problem with microcode level 760.28, it was detecting a failed drive. You need to replace the drive, and upgrade to the latest microcode.

Should I use VMware snapshots or DS5000 FlashCopy?

VMware snapshots are not free, you need to upgrade to the appropriate level of VMware to get this function, and it would be limited to your VMware data only. The advantage of DS5000 FlashCopy is that it applies to all of your operating systems and hypervisors in use, and eliminates the consumption of VMware overhead. It provides crash-consistent copies of your data. If your DS5000 disk system is dedicated to VMware, then you may want to compare costs versus trade-offs.

Any truth to the rumor that Fibre Channel protocol will be replaced by SAS?

SAS has some definite cost advantages, but is limited to 8 meters in length. Therefore, you will see more and more usage of SAS within storage devices, but outside the box, there will continue to be Fibre Channel, including FCP, FICON and FCoE. The Fibre Channel Industry Alliance [FCIA] has a healthy roadmap for 16 Gbps support and 20 Gbps interswitch link (ISL) connections.

What about Fibre Channel drives, are these going away?

We need to differentiate the connector from the drive itself. Manufacturers are able to produce 10K and 15K RPM drives with SAS instead of FC connectors. While many have suggested that a "Flash-and-Stash" approach of SSD+SATA would eliminate the need for high-speed drives, IBM predicts that there just won't be enough SSD produced to meet the performance needs of our clients over the next five years, so 15K RPM drives, more likely with SAS instead of FC connectors, will continue to be deployed for the next five years.  

We'd like more advanced hands-on labs, and to have the certification exams be more product-specific rather than exams for midrange disk or enterprise disk that are too wide-ranging.

Ok, we will take that feedback to the conference organizers.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is focused on disaster recovery from tape, how do I incorporate remote disk replication.

This is IBM's Unified Recovery Management, based on the seven tiers of disaster recovery established in 1983 at GUIDE conference.  You can combine local recovery with FastBack, data center server recovery with TSM and FlashCopy manager, and combine that with IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication (TPC-R), GDOC and GDPS to manage disk replication across business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) locations.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication only manages the LUNs, what about server failover and mapping the new servers to the replicated LUNs?

There are seven tiers of disaster recovery. The sixth tier is to manage the storage replication only, as TPC-R does. The seventh tier adds full server and network failover. For that you need something like IBM GDPS or GDOC that adds this capability.

All of my other vendor kit has bold advertising, prominent lettering, neon lights, bright colors, but our IBM kit is just black, often not even identifying the specific make or model, just "IBM" or "IBM System Storage".

IBM has opted for simplified packaging and our sleek, signature "raven black" color, and pass these savings on to you.

Bring back the SHARK fins!

We will bring that feedback to our development team. ("Shark" was the codename for IBM's ESS 800 disk model.  Fiberglass "fins" were made as promotional items and placed on top of ESS 800 disk systems to help "identify them" on the data center floor.  Unfortunately, professional golfer [<a href="http://www.shark.com/">Greg Norman</a>] complained, so IBM discontinued the use of the codename back in 2005.)

Where is Infiniband?

Like SAS, Infiniband had limited distance, about 10 to 15 meters, which proved unusable for server-to-storage network connections across data center floorspace. However, there are now 150 meter optical cables available, and you will find Infiniband used in server-to-server communications and inside storage systems.  IBM SONAS uses Infiniband today internally.  IBM DCS9900 offers Infiniband host-attachment for HPC customers.

We need midrange storage for our mainframe please?

In addition to the IBM System Storage DS8000 series, the IBM SAN Volume Controller and IBM XIV are able to connect to Linux on System z mainframes.

We need "Do's and Don'ts" on which software to run with which hardware.

IBM [Redbooks] are a good source for that, and we prioritize our efforts based on all those cards and letters you send the IBM Redbooks team.

The new TPC v4 reporting tool requires a bit of a learning curve.

The new reporting tool, based on Eclipse's Business Intelligence Reporting Tool [BIRT], is now standardized across the most of the Tivoli portfolio. Check out the [Tivoli Common Reporting] community page for assistance.

An unfortunate side-effect of using server virtualization like VMware is that it worsens management and backup issues. We now have many guests on each blade server.

IBM is the leading reseller of VMware, and understands that VMware adds an added layer of complexity. Thankfully, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager backups uses a lightweight agent. IBM [System Director VMcontrol] can help you manage a variety of hypervisor environments.

This was a great interactive session. I am glad everyone stayed late Thursday evening to participate in this discussion.

technorati tags: IBM, Technical University, DS8100, EPIC, PCI-DSS, FDE, Encryption, XIV, CWDM, DS5000, SAS, InfiniBand, FCIA, FCoE, FICON, GUIDE, Tivoli, Productivity Center, TPC-R, GDPS, SONAS, SVC, BIRT, Systems Director, VMcontrol

Tags:  svc sas infiniband pci-dss birt ds8100 tpc-r ficon fcoe sonas vmcontrol gdps ibm fde ds5000 productivity+center #ibmtechu tivoli systems+director encryption epic xiv fcia guide #ibmstorage cwdm #storage technical+university

Next week is [VMworld 2010], so I thought today would be a good day to write a blog post about reporting and managing virtual guest images.

As the original lead architect for IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, I am no stranger to reporting and management tools. Needless to say, if you have lots of virtual guest images, it makes sense to deploy reporting and management software. I had never heard of Veeam before, but I decided to check out Veeam Reporter 4.0, an enterprise-level reporting solution specifically designed for large Virtual Infrastructure (VI3) and vSphere virtual environments that allows you to automatically discover and collect information about your VMware virtual environment. Their 90-page User Guide offered these helpful "First Steps" on page 9 which I used as the master plan for my evaluation.

Install Veeam Reporter 4.0

The instructions appeared fairly straightforward: Download [the latest version] of the application. Unpack the downloaded archive and run the VeeamReporter.exe file. Then follow the installation wizard steps. What could go wrong?

I should have known better. Like IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, Veeam Reporter is designed to be installed on its own server-class machine with its own application web server and database. I wasn't going to stand up a new server in our lab just for this contest, so I decided to just install it on my Windows XP SP3, which Veeam had listed as a supported operating system level. I ran into a series of installation issues, including installing IIS, installing SQL server, and installing the SRSS component. I am more familiar with IBM's WebSphere Application Server and DB2 combination used in IBM's own products, and have experience with Apache and MySQL on a standard LAMP stack, so my lack of experience with IIS and SQL server made the installation more difficult. Many thanks to all the support personnel at Veeam, Microsoft, and my internal IT department to finally get all of this working.

It appears you can set this up as a client/server environment, where the Veeam Reporter server runs IIS and SQL Server, and then you have a browser on your client machine point to that server. In my cases, I have client browser and server all on one machine.

Create and run a collection job

This step also seemed fairly standard for reporting tools. Once you launch Veeam Reporter 4.0 for the first time, you need to retrieve data from your virtual infrastructure to be able to generate reports. To start the created collection job, select it and click the Start button on the toolbar. If you have a vCenter server in your VI environment, we recommend that you create a job for it to immediately collect data for all objects in its hierarchy. After that, you will be able to select VI objects that were engaged in the performed job using the Workspace, and generate reports for it.

I signed up for this contest August 7, but step 1 above took me two weeks to resolve all the installation iissues. I wanted to get my blog post entry for the contest BEFORE the start of VMworld. Since I am in Dallas, Texas this week for the IBM Storage Solutions University, I had to go through several firewalls for my laptop to tunnel through and get to my VMware Center back in Tucson.

Click on the graphic above to see larger view.

I was able to create and run a collection job. I have a WMware ESX 3.5 host running five guest images and 14 datastores. This seemed to be enough to evaluate the basic features of this reporting tool. Veeam Reporter let's you run the collection process manually, or set a "periodic" schedule to collect data every hour.

Generate reports manually or create a reporting job

Finally, I get to the fun part: To generate report manually, click the Workspace tab, select a necessary VI object from the tree view, date and collection job session, choose reports and click the Create Report button.

At this point, I am reminded of a famous poem:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
- William Blake

When evaluating products, try to imagine what the reports would look like with hundreds of virtual guest images. Certainly, I can see some potential, even though I had rather limited data to work with. In theory, the tool can create Visio output files, but you need to have Microsoft Visio installed. I have only "Visio Viewer" so I was unable to create any visio files with this product.

The reports can be exported to PDF, Word or Excel formats. Here is an example of an Excel spreadsheet export. While it has 14 bars for the 14 datastores, there are no labels, and the misleading details link in the lower right corner is non-functional. The only way for me to figure out what each referred to was to go back to my vCenter client, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a separate reporting tool.

This same report exported to PDF spanned across four pages, leaving the re-assembly to be done with a pair of scissors and celophane tape.

When you create reports, you can use SRSS or Veeam's internal proprietary format. Only SRSS reports can be put on the dashboard, so I recommend that.

Customize your dashboard

The fourth and final step is to configure your own dashboard: To add reports to the Dashboard, you should first create and save them using Workspace of Veeam Reporter 4.0. Keep in mind that you can add to the Dashboard only saved SSRS-based reports. To customize the Dashboard, click the Dashboard tab and then click the Edit Dashboard button. Customize the layout by dragging blue borders from the right and the bottom of the screen. Then, drag reports from the Reports list and drop them onto the created cells.

The "Free Edition" only allows you to put a single report on the dashboard, so as in step 3, you have to use your imagination of what the potential of the full license would looke like with multiple reports are on a single pane of glass.

(FTC Disclosure: I work for IBM, the leader in server virtualization worldwide, and the number #1 reseller of VMware. In this post, I review [Veeam Reporter 4.0] as my official entry for their blogging contest. IBM and Veeam do not have any business relationshiop that I know of, other than both being VMware business partners, so I am treating them here as an Independent Software Vendor (ISV). Veeam has not compensated me in any manner for this review, this review is not to be taken as an endorsement of Veeam or its products, and I was not provided any full or evaluator license keys. The review is based entirely on my experience using the "Free Edition" available to all for download. None of this blog post was pre-reviewed by anyone from Veeam. IBM, of course, also offers similar software, which I mention below for comparison purposes.)

At this point, you might be thinking, "Doesn't IBM offer something like this?" Of course it does! IBM is the leader in infrastructure reporting, monitoring and management software. Last October, [IBM unveiled IBM Systems Director VMcontrol] software. Not only does IBM Systems Director VMcontrol provide similar support for your VMware environment, it also manages Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen deployments, PowerVM on POWER-based serves, and even z/VM guest images on the System z mainframes. Combined with the rest of the IBM Systems Director, you can manage all of your physical and virtual servers with a single tool from a single pane of glass. How cool is that?

IBM VMcontrol comes in [three levels]:

• [Express Edition] offers the easiest way to manage virtual machines
• [Standard Edition] adds the ability to manage complete libraries of virtual images
• [Enterprise Edition] creates and enables the management of system pools – dynamic collections of computing resources used to support multiple virtual images running concurrently

To learn more, see the [VMcontrol Implementation Guide], take it for a test drive, with a [trial download], or talk to one of the many IBMers at [VMworld 2010] in San Francisco, August 30-September 2.

I would like to think Doug Hazelman, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam, for organizing this awesome blogging contest. If you liked this blog post, click here to [vote for me] to get counted for this contest.

technorati tags: IBM, VMcontrol, Veeam, Reporter, VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, PowerVM, zVM, VMworld

Tags:  ibm vmware powervm xen veeam reporter hyper-v vmworld vmcontrol zvm