Customizing Groups & Service Levels in VIPR SRM

ViPR SRM 3.5 introduced an entirely new interface for creating and managing groups and service levels. This new functionality makes it easy to classify storage and get detailed chargeback reports across a group of hosts that comprise an application or functional department. ViPR SRM comes with a set of default groups for VMs, Hypervisors, physical hosts and passive hosts. We also provide default definitions for Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze service levels. Let’s take a look at how we can customize groups and service levels to work in your environment.

In Centralized Management (which we access from the administration panel) there is a new entry in the tree for Groups Management.

First we will look at the Device Groups which we can use to make groups of hosts that can then be used for chargeback reporting. I’ll start by making a new Device Group. I am going to use our dynamic grouping capabilities to match all Hosts that contain “orcl” or “sql”. This would select all the Oracle and SQL hosts in my environment. This dynamic group will always automatically pick up new hosts that match the dynamic selection criteria. I can also add Static Members to groups. These are a one-time static addition to my device groups for hosts that don’t follow a standard pattern for matching.

You can see in the screenshot below how easy it is to customize these groups.

Now let’s take a look at the Service Level by LUN entry in the tree.

In the Service Level by LUN section we have predefined service levels to classify LUNs for chargeback and SLA reporting. ViPR SRM provides predefined definitions for the service levels that can easily be customized as well as the ability to generate completely new custom rules. In the below example we can see the rule for a LUN to be classified as Platinum.

These out of the box rules will mark a LUN as Platinum if it is on all Flash disks, if it is in a Platinum FAST policy or if is in a Platinum ViPR Virtual Storage Pool.  ViPR SRM allows you to create up to three custom rules, which I’ll show you below.

You can see I made a custom service level named ECN Service Level that will match ECN Raid type and ECN disk type. I also specified a response time between 4ms and 12ms for this service level. Once I save this all LUNs that match this new definition will now display in all my service level reports in ViPR SRM.

The response times will be used to populate new compliance reports on over and under tiered LUNs.   These reports are great for identifying LUNs which can be moved to lower cost storage as well as LUNs which need to be moved to higher performance storage to ensure service level compliance.

Once we have configured our groups and customized our service levels we can now look at our new customized chargeback reports in the dashboards section under “chargeback by group”.    Come back for a follow on post and I'll detail how the chargeback reports can help you better understand the true cost of storage in your environment.