How I Survived Escalations

The advent of multiple layers of virtualization has made it impossible for customers to know how different types of disks are being utilized by various applications. Additionally, virtualization technologies such as Meta LUN, Virtual Provisioning (VP), and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) have made it difficult to create a direct disk capacity utilization report.

As a result, storage administrators often struggle to satisfactorily answer customer questions, such as:

• How much of my EFD disk is being used by the SAP Application?

• If usage is more than expected, which host in the SAP group is responsible for it?

• Which application is using most of my FC Storage?

• If my applications are only using 2.5 TB of SATA disk, why is the total usage 3 TB? Where is the extra space being used?

• Why is my ECM application using EFD space when they are not billed for it?

• What is the trend of capacity utilization of ESX across multiple arrays?

Existing tools do not help in reporting when an application is spread across multiple physical arrays. This report is vital as no tool is currently available to analyze and report FAST VP movement of data at a sub LUN tier level, or to create a trending report per application based on FAST movement.

In this Knowledge Sharing article, Mumshad Mannambeth and Nasia Ullas describe a procedure they developed that can collate, analyze, and generate a report which answers questions such as those above and more. This report is simple enough to be understood by an end user or customer who doesn’t know the complex architecture of FAST VP/Thin Provisioning. Moreover, factoring in the ‘FAST usage trending report’ with current capacity planning method provides a more accurate capacity management technique.

Read the full article.