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Storage Topology

By Sreenath Menon posted Thu February 23, 2023 11:51 PM

  

Overview

PowerVC does integrated virtualization management from virtual machine to storage. It helps in automation and simplifies infrastructure management from one place.

There is a complex stack in the backend, which includes Virtual IO Server (VIOS) (Initiator), Storage (Target), HMC or NovaLink hosts, Fabric switches, FC Ports, and so on.  You can quickly create one or more virtual machines and attach volumes to it from either the GUI or REST API.

You also have different options to configure these VM deployments. You can create custom paths in which you make sure that there are two VIOS per path. You can define a set of VIOS ports to be used for volume attachments (IPG). And then there are different connectivity types like Network Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), vSCSI, vSCSI + NPIV, or SPP. 

After you deploy a VM and attach volumes to it, you can then view these volumes from the Volumes tab of the VM list page.

Attached volumes tab

But how are these volumes connected to the corresponding VM? 

Is it a single/dual VIOS path?  What ports and fabrics are involved? What are the vFC mappings?

To get this information you have to login to the HMC GUI or access the Fabric/VIOS CLI.

 

What if PowerVC can visualize the storage path mapping of each VM in the UI? 

The Topology feature that is introduced in the PowerVC 2.1.0 release offers you this visualization with a holistic view of resources in a project. Search for any given virtual machine in the project and PowerVC generates an end-to-end path from VM to Storage and further to volume in one click, providing you a view of the connection path. 

In addition to viewing the resource connections, you can click on a component to view more details. This visualization at the resource level helps you to debug and detect errors. 

To view the topology diagram, follow these steps. 

  1. Go to the Dashboard menu.
  2. Click Topology. 
  3. Specify or select a VM from the search list and view the interconnectivity of the VM with other resources in a project.
Topology diagram


     4. Click any of the components to view more details of the specific resource.
          You see a properties panel with information on the state, health, and other details of the resource.  

Clicking on any resource within the topology diagram will display the properties for that resource



You can also zoom in and zoom out each resource. 

Scenarios

  • Volumes from multiple storages - VM might have volumes attached from multiple storages.
VM having volumes attached from multiple storages



  • Resources in Error State - The topology diagram highlights the error if a VM, host, or storage.   
VM in error state highlighted



  • IPG configuration - Sometimes, you may have configured Initiator Port Groups (IPG) to use only a subset of ports for volume attach.
Topology Diagram when IPG is configured for VM deploy

 

  • Data volume grouping - If you have workloads with a large number of volumes, the topology diagram group the volumes together.
When there are large number of volumes attached to a VM, they will be grouped together in the topology diagram



  • Connectivity options

          1. vSCSI boot and data volumes          

 VSCSI boot and data connection


          2. vSCSI boot and NPIV data volume connectivity

VSCSI boot and NPIV data volume connectivity



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Blog authors

Sreenath Menon

Poovannan E

Praveen Kapoor

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https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/sreenath-menon/2023/02/07/storage-topology