Cool Trick with Excel and MD3000i Video

ToddMuirhead — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:57:00 GMT

In response to a few questions that came up, I put together a video that shows how to do a cool trick with Microsoft Excel to create graphs of MD3000i array level performance data. I posted an entry here last week and also put up a wiki page about how you can use the smCLI command line tool to get array level performance data (Individual storage processors, array totals, and individual virtual disks) from an MD3000i. The output of this command is a csv (comma separated values) text file. I included on the wiki page a nice graph of the performance based on the data from this output file. What I didn't go into was how to create such a graph.

So now you have this great little video that will show you one way that you can use Excel to create a graph based on the data in the file. I don't claim to be a know-it-all when it comes to Excel, but the way that I do it in the video works. I would love to hear from anybody who knows of other (possibly better) ways to do it.

Todd

Array Level MD3000i Performance Monitoring

ToddMuirhead — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:37:00 GMT

During the weekly DellTechCenter Tech Tuesday chat a couple of weeks ago a question came up about performance monitoring with the PowerVault MD3000i iSCSI array. The initial question was how to do performance monitoring from Linux and we addressed it in a followup discussion thread. The answer at this point was to use iostat for Linux or perfmon in windows to monitor performance on each host that was attached to the MD3000i array. This lead to a follow on question which was how to monitor the performance for the entire array.

The management tool for the MD3000i, PowerVault Modular Disk Storage Manager, does not include any performance stats beyond basic iSCSI port level stats. Some investigation into the command line interface for the MD3000i revealed that there is a command to capture the performance stats on the array. Using the smcli, which is installed as part of the MDSM, it is possible to collect the performance stats for the array, controllers, and virtual disks to a csv file.

This turns out to be pretty cool and not too hard to do. Just a simple command and a little bit of spreadsheet magic and you too can produce cool performance graphs of your MD3000i. The details are posted here on delltechcenter.com.

Todd

Virtualization Frontier

Cool Trick with Excel and MD3000i Video

Array Level MD3000i Performance Monitoring