At least if you are a 3PAR and/or VMware infrastructure administrator!
While talking last week at HP Discover in the Blogger Lounge with David Scott about the futures of HP Storage and 3PAR in particular, he mentioned the release of a new software product named HP StoreFront Analytics Pack for VMware vCOPS.
Together with my “3PARtners in crime” Justin Vashisht (@3cvguy – 3cvguy.com) and Craig Kilborn (@vmfocus – vmfocus.com) we hit the HP Discover floor and started the search. All in between those nice yellow storage boxes we were able to do a little video with a demonstration of the product. See below.
What HP StoreFront Analytics Pack for VMware vCOPS actually does is actually quite cool.
It gives a complete drilldown from Virtual Machine up to the 3PAR storage box displaying all the used components in between them: I/O Ports, physical drives, CPG’s, volumes, controllers, and so on.
It will tell further all about performance, response time, I/O sizes, IOPS, Top5 users and health. All in 1 console (VMware vCops) in just 1 click away… Awesome!
A simple test with IOmeter stressing 1 VM in particular displayed the complete tree of which servers (physical and virtual) were impacted since they were running on the same volume, controller, path etc… Life of an administrator can be really easy. At least with this software.
The software is license based per 3PAR storage system, however some features are for free:
Free:
– Health Information for the Array
Licensed:
– Capacity Information
– Performance Information (Key performance metrics: Bandwidth, IOPS)
Find here more information on this great product:
– HP StoreFront Analytics Pack for vCenter Operations Manager – Free Trial*
– HP StoreFront Analytics Pack for vCenter Operations Manager – QuickSpecs
– HP StoreFront Analytics Pack for vCenter Operations Manager – User Guide
This new tool comes on top of the already existing HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter, which gave you a complete view on your 3PAR configuration inside the VMware management console. However this tool does not go that deep into detail like performance counters and bottleneck detection… Storefront Analytics Pack for vCOPS is a nice/big step forward!
