What tools / commands to collect IOPS&throughput&response time on FA and Hosts?

from storage array perspective you can use Unisphere for VMAX with Performance. It's a licensed product but it gives you so many statistics, it's great. I have been also using EMC Control Center Performance Manager, typically it's a pretty "fat" product with a lot of other capabilities but one of the features was Performance Manager. Unless you already have it in your environment i would not invest in it. There is always symstat command but stats are very limited.

On host side you have perfmon, sar, iostat

Solutions Enabler command "symstat" is able to see real time performance statics, although it's not lot information but it can cover which you queried, see the following document for more informations

Monitoring Symmetrix Performance using symstat CLI

For FA Port Performance Status, See  5. Director ports performance statistics

For the specific host, you should figure out which devices are presented to your Win/Linux hosts, Then refer: 2. Device Performance Statistics

Hello emcmagic,

Beginning with Enginuity 5876, EMC Unisphere for VMAX (hitherto known simply as Unisphere) simplifies storage management under a common framework, incorporating Symmetrix Performance Analyzer(SPA) which previously required a separate interface.

So as Dynamox rightly mentioned, you could use the Unisphere for VMAX which has a new performance plugin, to monitor performance and capacity over time, view high frequency metrics in real time, view Symmetrix system heat maps, etc.

But if you are on an older code, you could use the SPA (a licensed feature) to view and work with performance data. Attached, a sample SPA screenshot for 1 statistic (host IOPS hitting an FA port) from my environment for your reference.

If using the SYMCLI, you'll be using a #symstat to gather information.

For your AIX servers, you could use an #nmon which gives you a wealth of performance statistics (clubs your sar, iostat, vmstat,etc. stats under one roof). It uses minimal processor cycles and you can export the information to spreadsheets for viewing, comparisons,etc.

regards.

Hello rohang,

We are still using SMC for VMAX. Can I incorporate SPA into SMC? assuming I need a license for it.

With Unisphere for VMAX and SPA, I can see IOPS at FA ports as shown in your screenshot. What about Response Time and Bandwidth, are there any columns there can show me those two stastics, or how do I find out?

Also, are there any logic relationship between host IOPS and FA IOPS? can I make some logic connection from one to the other?

Thank you!

  You can see response time with Unisphere.  You should move from SMC/SPA into Unisphere if possible.  There have been a lot of enhancements to the performance monitoring area, and I think you will like what you see.

Host IOPs and FA IOPs should be the same, however some FA metrics are in requests, which are 64K, so if you have IOs larger than 64K, or that span tracks, one host IO may result in multiple requests.

Quincy56,

Can you please elaborate the following a little bit more?

>Host IOPs and FA IOPs should be the same, however some FA metrics are in requests, which are 64K, so if you have IOs larger >than 64K, or that span tracks, one host IO may result in multiple requests.

Are you saying for I/O block larger than 64K(EMC default block size for I/O) on the host, to achieve the number of IOPS on the host would require more IOPS on FA port?

A single host IO is a single IO.  However some counters on the FA are "requests for cache slots" (requests).  Any counters that say "requests" are in 64k chunks.  So a 256k IO would be a minimum of 4 requests.  Look at the help section for the metric definitions.

Are you saying for I/O block larger than 64K(EMC default block size for I/O) on the host, to achieve the number of IOPS on the host would require more IOPS on FA port?

As Quincy mentioned, a single host IO is a single IO.

Remember: It all depends on the IO size. An IO size of 4k can do more IOPS on the FA CPU than a 1MB IO size.

some counters on the FA are "requests for cache slots" (requests).  Any counters that say "requests" are in 64k chunks.

64K is the size of a cache slot and also the size of 1 track on the disk.

If you look at the SPA screenshot that I first attached, you see a "Reqs/sec" metric. This is the number of data transfers between the director and the cache, which will happen in multiples of 64KB which is the size of a cache slot in Symmetrix. Again, An IO may require multiple requests depending on IO size, alignment, or both. So, if the IO size that the cache wants to transfer to the director is exactly 64 KB, it will be counted as 1 request - assuming the IO is aligned on the track boundary.

So, we're talking about 2 metrics here ..

Host IOs/sec

Number of host IO operations performed each second by all Symmetrix devices, including writes and random and sequential reads.

FE Reqs/sec

Data transfers between the director and the cache. An IO may require multiple requests depending on IO size, alignment, or both.

Remember that the FE Reqs/sec metric will be a multiple of the cache slot size (64KB)

regards.

rohang, very well put. Thank you all!

One more last question, what tools can I use to show me hostoric data on metrics? SPA, ECC, or symstat?