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XIV host profiler

By Archive User posted Tue June 04, 2013 08:25 AM

  

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:

image


image  

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




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