Originally posted by: hannes_one
As Sebastian mentioned in the first post of this new blog you will
find some cool information about IBM Storage Products and their
surroundings. I am Hannes, working for IBM as second level support
for IBM XIV Storage systems for nearly five years. For a long time I
thought a blog would be a cool/nice add-on to my daily work in order
to deliver some insights into our business and products.... Now I
made it ;) Here is my first post:
HAK 2.0
On the 11th of March 2013 IBM released Version 2.0 of
its Host Attachment Kit (HAK) for IBM XIV Storage systems on FixCentral.
This is the first major update compared to the 1.x Versions IBM
announced 3.5 years ago. Obviously it hold fixes for the rare
known issues we have... but also there is a really cool new
feature which I will show here:
The NEW feature -- xhop
xiv_host_profiler or simply xhop
delivers a great way to check if your server is connected to your
IBM XIV Storage System according to IBMs best practices and
delivers additional information regarding the host attachment. In
order to archive this the xhop verifies the current
configuration against a set of rules stored within the HAK
installation. Updates to the rule set can be downloaded as they
arrive on FixCentral.
When the tool runs for the first time it will also
upload the result to the supported XIV Storage Systems (11.2
and up). This will ensure IBM captures the xhop output via the
next XRAY package and can check your hosts for optimal
configuration, if you or we expect issues in this area.
There is NO private data in the package, it just collects the OS
Type, HBA Model and its multipathing configuration, for more
details check the Host Attachment Guide/Release Notes available on
FixCentral.
Also there is an Option to schedule a cron-job for the xhop, this
will make sure you always have actual results for your
configuration on your host and on the XIV Storage.
Now lets show some output:
xhop on Windows 2008:
What about XIV Gen2 systems?
xiv_host_profiler will also work for Hosts
attached to XIV Gen2 systems, but it will not upload the results
to the XIV.
A few words from a support perspective:
This tool allows our customers to easily check the
basic connectivity requirements according to SSIC
and best practices.It will not automate a complete
design/connectivity review but allows you to start the
investigation easily from your host.
Wow, this was my first blog post. Went much smoother
that I expected, hope you enjoyed my post as much as I enjoyed
writing it.
- Hannes