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central management, logs, alerting and monitoring for VNX and Unity
Dear all,
I've got a quite interesting request by a customer. We do have 2x EMC VNX 5300 Gen 1 systems and 2x EMC Unity 300F within its environment. Now he asked me if there is a way to central monitor and configure these systems instead of opening a browser windows for each of these devices.
Well I know Unisphere Central which sould be a good tool to do that but I am unsure about it because there are several products on the EMC market and it seems to have certain dependencies and limitations which I am not aware of because I only installed it once with 2 EMC VNX systems quite a while ago and since then didn't touch it again.....
I found these documents....
https://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h13827-unisphere-central-v4-wp.pdf
and now I have several questions which I would like to verify...
1) Is Unisphere Central able to manage both mentioned systems (VNX and Unity)? Based on the document yes
2) Is there a certain firmware required on the devices to be able to use Unisphere Central?
3) Do I need special contracts, licences or anything else to use Unisphere Central or is it free? Based on my knowledge it is for free
4) What is possible to do within the Unispehre Central solution? Central Configuration? Central (Performance) Monitroing? Central Alerts and Logs?
5) I am not quite sure but I think in the old versions if you wanted to configure a system (VNX for example) from within Unisphere Central a new browser window opened to the system, is this still the case or am I able to configure a machine from within Unisphere Central directly?
6) Is Unisphere Central able to send alerts from a machine directly to an email? Or do we still need to confgure the system to do this?
7) Do we need VNX Monitoring and Reporting? If so why? Perfomane Trending and Graphs? For VNX and Unity? Is it an expensive thing?
8) What is SRM?
9) What is Storage Analytics?
10) What is Resource Management Suite?
Sorry for the amount of questions but I am a bit overwhelmed by the amount of tools, combinationss and information.
What do you think is the best way to achieve the customers goal?
Thank you very much
Rainer_EMC
8.6K Posts
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November 7th, 2016 10:00
1) manage in terms or monitoring yes - active Management like config changes no
2) current firmware should be ok - for details see the release notes
3) it is free of charge
4) mostly monitoring - see the White paper and documentation
5) still the case for active Management - called link and launch
6) I dont think so
7) it depends - it has more metrics, exportable reports ...
Since it comes with a trial licencse I would suggest to evaluate both.
For VNX it is free - for Unity it is a small license
8) SRM is a Suite that has a superset of the storage Monitoring and includes other things like network, heterogenous storage, is customizable, ... There should be enough info available about it on emc.com
9) it is geared towards vmWare environments
10) dont know - sounds like SRM
Rainer
P.S.: If you want to advise a customer I would suggest to build up some knowledge with more hands-on and reading than a forum post
Rainer_EMC
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November 8th, 2016 09:00
I am not aware of a tool for active management that includes all the products
DukeR1337
208 Posts
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November 8th, 2016 09:00
Hi Rainer
Thanks for your gorgeous feedback. Is there a tool out there which can manage EMC products centrally or is it always click and lunch like you mentioned?
What I am going to do now is to setup an environment with some devices internally and after that I feel better to advise the customer but you are absolutly right but life works sometimes different then theory ;-)