Using the EMC Assessment Workbench to Perform an FSA

A useful tool for gathering information from customer environments is the EMC Workbench. This tool has been extensively used to validate the value for BRS teams as it contains a deduplication scan. There is also a File System Assessment included in this tool (FSA) that proves to be exceptionally useful when trying to determine workloads, file types, file sizes, access trends, growth, etc. Specifically valuable within home directory workloads.

The Assessment Workbench is obtained from PowerLink:

https://elabadvisor.emc.com/app/licensedtools/list

Running the tool is simple but if you need to run it remote there is a little gotcha. It attempts to reach into EMC to obtain a license key. I have found a way to work around this by installing locally on my machine and delivering the license file to the customer. The good thing is the key is temporary and expires after 90 days so no need to worry about them abusing the tool.

To get the key install the workbench locally and use your EMC credentials to log in when required to access the license key. It will install a directory in your
current user directory:

C:\Users\USERNAME\.lava

and create a file called authcache.lava

This file is 1-3KB and easy to email to the customer. Then just have them create the .lava directory and drop the file in. You may have to run the Workbench application let it error out once attempting to locate the file within the EMC network and run it again once the license file is in place.

Running the app is very simple. I found it easy to have the customer simply create a umap of the shares we wish to scan in a text file and import it. The documentation of the workbench gives some guidelines about how many files/capacity to scan but I've successfully run scans on 300MM files with no issues. I've not heard any complaints of performance issues either. However, it could take a few days to collect the data. Once the scan is complete it'll spit out a small file and you simply submit that to Mitrend for a detailed PowerPoint and more importantly a very detailed Excel spreadsheet.

Attached is an example of the type of data it will collect.