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jliu
Contributor
Contributor

Monitoring question

It is standard to have dual path to SAN storage, and teaming for network uplink in ESX setup. Path failover works great.

Question is how monitor the health of each path.

Thanks, Jeff

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Texiwill
Leadership
Leadership

Hello,

Determine if there are any ESX based agents for your FC-HBA. Generally they have some method to monitor if there are problems with the hardware. The SAN itself can also monitor the hardware.... Not sure what you want to see however.


Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354, As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

--
Edward L. Haletky
vExpert XIV: 2009-2023,
VMTN Community Moderator
vSphere Upgrade Saga: https://www.astroarch.com/blogs
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Texiwill
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jliu
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, Texiwell.

Our vmdk LUNs are DMX FC Path Failover in ESX works very well. they need to be monitored in case loss redundent.

We use Emulex HBA, it does add mesage to /var/log/messages, any easy way to get these to email, etc.?

Same thing apply to network teaming, I need alert when one uplink is not working.

Jeff

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mike_laspina
Champion
Champion

Hi,

Monitoring a SAN path can be complex.

There is more involved than an FC path there is the Switches, Links, LUN masking, Zoning and Storage Processors.

This is usually done with a standards based management interface named FDMI (Fabric Device Managment Interface) and software that connects to the Switches and Storage Processors over IP.

One example of this is ONARO's SANscreen which is now under the NetApp umbrella.

From the network side you will find SNMP very well suited to provide this info.

You can use an SNMP management console to poll the ESX servers for a large number of MIB based information items.

The SNMP service is very easy to enable and should be enabled with some security in mind as it can be dangerous if secuirity is ignored.

http://blog.laspina.ca/ vExpert 2009
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lamw
Community Manager
Community Manager

If you happen to run HP Hardware you can install HP SIM Agents, this will monitor not only your SAN FC paths but your vmfs, disks, network, cpu, etc. The information is sent via SNMP which can go to dedicted SIM Server for alerts or to another monitoring solution.

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jliu
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I am using Dell server.?:|

Do you monitor this item in your enviornment?

Thanks, Jeff

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lamw
Community Manager
Community Manager

Unfortunately we do not, but again, I think Dell has an equilv utility to monitor their hardware and worse case you can still use default net-snmp to look good amount of the internals of ESX, the only thing we currently can't monitor is VMFS volumes, only the HP SIM Agent can see that information, we haven't been able to get that out of the net-snmp default. Though you can get information on io, cpu, memory, disk if those started to get scsi errors or write errors, you would be notified and you can see if it's hardware related.

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jliu
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, lamw. I will check with Dell.

BTW, do you have any third monitoring tool worth to recommend?

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