New SAN Module

Brief description

The BVQ SAN Package is a complete new extension package for BVQ. It introduces support for Brocade SAN switches and directors. It enables you to interactively explore your SAN configuration and check it for issues, chart SAN Switch port performance and error metrics, create reports about port utilization and drill through all the layers between SVC, BVQ, and VMware objects in end to end views.

Licensing

Similar to all other available BVQ add on packages, its licensing is based on the capacity of a licensed primary system platform (Spectrum virtualize (SVC), Storwize, ...). Please review the BVQ License Information Page or ask your sales contact for more information. 

Information gathering

To collect information a BVQ SAN Scanner needs to be configured to connect to a Brocade SMI/S Provider, which can be enabled as part of a Brocade Network Advisor (BNA). There is an issue with the Brocade SMI provider and the tracking of changes, so we strongly recommend to use the free (headless) Brocade SMI provider separately or at least to switch off "Track changes" in the BNA. See Supported Environments for more details and the supported versions of the Brocade SMI provider.

Supported SAN objects

This first version of the BVQ SAN Package supports basic elements of a SAN environment. The following overview depicts the elementary relationships of these objects and their link to connected BVQ objects:

Where to find SAN objects?

Similar to all other objects, they show up in the BVQ Path browser inside the view property panel or can be opened as a Table from the Favorite browser. All SAN objects can be combined in an end to end relation to all other objects.

Object attributes

BVQ displays the full set of all reported attributes for each supported SAN object. Be aware that only a subset of configuration parameters is reported by the Brocade SMI provider. In addition, BVQ calculates counters for each grouping object, so that their number of grouped objects are known. For example a SAN Fabric knows how many SAN Switches it contains, how many SAN Switch ports they have and how many of them are connected or free for use. Please explore the BVQ SAN Table view favorites to get an impression of the most important attributes.

Performance and error metrics

The BVQ SAN Package gathers all SAN Switch port statistics delivered from the Brocade SMI provider. Similar to all other statistics, you can simply drill into a chart with the statistics related to an object with a simple click on the SAN entry in the context menu of this object:

That opens our well known BVQ Chart view, where you can select statistic metrics in the selection panel. The following screenshot shows the full set of available metrics in the expert tab:

Use cases

You can find a collection of use cases on the BVQ SAN Package (Brocade) page.

Other information

SAN System Favorites (v5.5.3)

In v5.5.3 several predefined SAN favorites have been added. They allow a quick and easy overview or analysis of all SANs scanned by BVQ.

The following favorites can now be found in the System folder:

• Table views for every SAN Object Type
  
• SAN topology multiview favorites
  
• SAN performance multiview favorites
  
• Qualification of SAN objects
  
• SAN analytic favorites
  

To get more information, either click on View Info for the selected SAN favorite in the System tree...

... or open a new favorite and hover the mouse over the window-symbol in the upper left corner of a window or view

A window will pop-up explaining

• what the use case of the favorite/view is
• how to interprete the displayed results
• which information to expect/not to expect in the view and what the next recommended actions are

New Alerting Engine

With version 5.5 BVQ got a whole new alerting engine which replaces the old module functionality completely.

New key features:

• Web UI to visualize alerting results
• Flexible object selection to avoid manual mappings
• Alert conditions based on topology attributes and all available performance indicators
• Alert rule creation possible from the Web UI and the Classic GUI
• New notification concept with new additional options

Alerting Web UI

The new Alerting Web UI is available via the BVQ-Server and splitted into two main areas Overview and Manage alert rules

• Overview: Get an overview of the current and historical alert levels for all alert rules, one specific alert rule or even one specific object
• Manage alert rules: Create, edit, delete or organize your alert rules

Manage alert rules

Alert rules can be created and edited form the Web UI and Classic GUI and require some configuration in different sections.

Notification concept

With this version we introduce a new concept to notify the user. Use the BVQ Web UI to configure all its options, like Notification configurations, Email servers, log filenames and others. You give each Notification configuration a specific name, by which it can be reused in any Alert rule.

Although the notifications are only used within the alerting right now there are many plans for the near future to use this concept for different usecases.

(Email) Servers

The Email server can be used in multiple notification configurations. For that you need to give it an unique name.

Notification configurations

A Notification configuration defines how the notification should be delivered. The settings vary in detail based on the selected type.

At this time we support the following notification types:

SVC 8.2 & IBM FlashSystem 9100 support

On July 10th, 2018, IBM has announced the next generation FlashSystem product built with Spectrum Virtualize capabilities. The FS9100 is running SW version 8.2.0. BVQ is ready to scan and support both, the new hardware and the new software. This support was added in BVQ v5.5.2

SVC 7.6 & 7.8.1 feature support

SVC 7.6 - Distributed RAID (DRAID) support

A new type of RAID has been introduced in SVC v7.6 - Distributed RAID (DRAID).

While traditional RAID arrays have one or more dedicated spare drives which are idle unless an active member in the array fails, DRAID arrays have so called rebuild areas which means there is no dedicated spare drive and all drives in the array can do I/O.

DRAIDs have two major advantages over traditional RAID arrays: greater throughput and a massively reduced rebuild time in case of a drive failure.

There are a bunch of new attributes related to DRAID which can now be displayed in the Detail Pane for Object Type "Drive Array".

SVC 7.6 - Hyperswap & Remote Copy integration

When creating a volume on an SVC cluster configured in Hyperswap topology, four VDisks are created:

• one "master" VDisk
• one "auxiliary" VDisk which is in an active-active remote copy relationship with the "master" VDisk
• two change volumes which are flash copy targets for "master" and "auxiliary" VDisk

All new SVC attributes related to the new feature are now included in BVQ.

To make it easier to find out which VDisks belong to a volume, BVQ displays the master's volume name (instead of its own VDisk name) followed by a suffix indicating the use of the VDisk. The names of related FC mappings are displayed in a similar way:

Some examples for RC relationships, FC mappings and related VDisks:

The same name-suffix-logic also applies to VDisks and FC mappings of GMCV relationships (Global Mirror with Change Volumes):

SVC 7.8.1 - Port Congestion Performance Statistics

Some additional SVC FC node port congestion statistics became available in SVC v7.8.1 which are helpful to explore problems between SVC and SAN. Prior to SVC v7.8.1 (which means 8GB FC HBAs), metric Buffer credit zero wait % (BBCZ) has always been helpful but this metric is no longer reported by 16GB (and newer) FC HBAs. To cover this gap, IBM developed this new congestion statistic set which is available for FC port types. Please refer to the IBM documentation for more details about them. Especially Transfer congestion > Normal > Blocked int % is the most comparable to Buffer credit zero wait % and has the same meaning: % of measured interval blocked due to congestion.

The new congestion statistics can be found in the metric chooser's Basic- and Expert-Tab of object type "SVC Node Port":

GUI Improvements

New menu to add table columns

Adding columns to a table is now much easier than in earlier releases because a new menu allows you to select multiple attributes at once. All attributes available for the selected object type including their description and CLI notation are listed in this new menu. Just right-click on the table header column and select "Table columns". The new menu opens and you can simply add one ore more new attributes by single-clicking on the check-box or double-clicking anywhere on the selected row.

Enhanced Chart Context Menu

The chart context menu which open on a right click on the chart background has been made more user friendly. More actions can now be performed via a single menu:

• use Timing to select a different time interval
• choose Metrics to change, add or remove metrics
• go to Objects to select the objects that should be charted
• adjust Drawing options if required
  
• select General to change the path to display different object types in a different hierarchy

Path Base Charting (PBC) in Object Context Menu

Path Based Charting was introduced in v5.3 (see v5.3 Introduction of PBC), continued in v5.4 (see v5.4 Enhanced PBC) and completely replaced the old chart view consistently in this release. Now a PBC view also opens, when called from the Object Context Menu. A so invoked PBC view opens with the chart in the top section and a table section showing all contained objects below it. A path is preselected for that view, that only contains /BVQ/<chosen object type>.  As usual, only the "Aggregated" object visible, but in a PBC view, the leading path element "BVQ" has taken over this role. The chosen object type path element is also filtered to only contain the objects that had been selected before the context menu was opened. To change the visibility of your objects, use the new Chart > Objects dialog in the view's properties or the Chart visibility menu options in the object context menu.

Object specific actions in Table view

In previous releases, a all cells of a row in a Table view only behave as the primary object. For example, a double-click anywhere in the row opened the Detail pane for the given object of that row. In this release, all cells showing references to other objects allow specific action on these. For example, a double-click on such a cell will open the Detail pane for this object. Its Object Context Menu also offers specific actions (change chart visibility, call PBC, select it in another view, ...). A cell that supports that feature shows the object's name underlined.

Improved BVQ Server Web UI

The BVQ-Server Web UI has been migrated to a new CSS Framework (VueJS). In this process we improved many details and reorganized some pages.

Scanner overview