ManageTrends Users Guide
Introduction
The StorTrends ManageTrends UI is a simple, intuitive way for an IT manager to quickly and effectively manage and monitor their StorTrends SAN. Within this guide, users will be able to explore the different aspects of the UI as well as how the functionality of the features within work. Once a particular StorTrends SAN has the networking configured, accessing ManageTrends is effortless. Simply type one of the Alias IPs found on either controller into your favorite web browser and enter your credentials.
Supported Browsers:
• Internet Explorer version 9+
• Google Chrome version 40+
• Mozilla Firefox version 35+
NOTE: By default, the credentials for ManageTrends are ‘itxadmin’ for the username and ‘password’ for the password. During your installation, the dedicated StorTrends Solutions Engineer helping you through the install should aid you in changing this password.
Storage Statistics
Upon logging in, the first section that the user is presented with is the Storage Statistics section. In this area, the user can see capacity and performance information about the overall SAN. This section of the UI has a few key pieces of information that can be a boon to any IT manager’s job.
The first few sections cover capacity usage, recent events, and SMART information, as seen below:
Capacity Usage
The top portion of the Storage Statistics section gives an idea of capacity usage for the SAN as well as the efficiency of deduplication and compression on the SAN. In the top right corner, there is a yellow box with a number inside – this number indicates the current gain from deduplication and compression. In the screenshot above, it is clear that the data reduction ratio is 4.1:1. To gain a better understanding of what this number means, the section directly below that helps illustrate the efficiency of deduplication and compression.
This section is divided into a top and bottom half, each showing overall usable capacity on the left, used capacity in the middle, and free capacity on the right. The top half is the effective capacity section and illustrates the capacity that all servers in an environment are utilizing. This is the capacity that would need to be physically available on a SAN without deduplication and compression. The bottom halve is the physical capacity section and illustrates the capacity that is physically being utilized on the SAN, after deduplication and compression. Between the two sections is a piece that joins the effective used capacity to the physical used capacity to help illustrate how the used capacity footprint dwindles as it goes through the deduplication and compression engines to finally arrive down on the SSDs themselves.
The data reduction ratio will update every 20 seconds, if an update is needed, in order to ensure that an IT manager can always get a clear, up-to-date view of the efficiency of deduplication and compression on the SAN. As this number updates, the Predicted Capacity number on the left portion of the effective capacity section will update as well, to ensure that an IT manager is aware of the capacity potential of the SAN at all times.
Events & SMART Information
New Events
The New Events subsection of the UI is a quick way for an IT manager to login to ManageTrends and immediately be made of aware of any warning and/or critical events that have recently been logged on the system. These events are events that may need some intervention by either the IT manager or the StorTrends Support Team and are made available in a quick, easy to read format to ensure that the proper steps can be taken on the SAN as quickly as possible so as to rectify any potential issues.
SMART
The SMART and Temperature subsection of the UI keeps track of all SMART related data on each individual drive on the SAN as well as any expansion shelves as well as the temperature levels of the SAN itself. The main piece of information that is tracked for SSDs is the endurance levels of the drives. SSDs have a limited number of writes that the cells can take, and that number is gauged by the endurance level of the drives. Once the endurance of a particular drive reaches 20% endurance remaining, the SMART Health Status will change to a warning state. Once a drive reaches this threshold, it is recommended to proactively replace the drive as the endurance levels of the drives drop exponentially from that point.
For temperature, the SAN tracks the status of all drives and other hardware components. If a fan fails or a single drive starts to demonstrate elevated temperature levels for example, the Temperature Status will change to a warning/critical state to make the IT manager aware that action needs to be taken.
Performance
The Performance section illustrates different performance metrics for the SAN overall. This is a good way to quickly see how well the SAN is performing from a latency, IOPS, and/or throughput perspective, as seen below:
Latency, IOPS, & Throughput
The Latency, IOPS, and Throughput sections shows an IT manager charts of the last two hours’ worth of information on the left that can be hovered over at any point to see values at a particular point in time. The charts shows both read values (in blue) and write values (in green). On the right, there are numerical representations of instantaneous values and the last hour’s average for both read and write values.
The instantaneous values as well as the chart update automatically every 20 seconds so that an up-to-date representation is always available. The end of the Performance section shows some more general information, such as I/O size distribution and read/write ratio:
I/O Size Distribution
The I/O Size Distribution section illustrates the percentages of block sizes coming into the SAN (writes) or going out of the SAN (reads) . This helps illustrate if a greater percentage of overall I/O workloads are random or sequential in nature. The greater the overall percentage of blocks are smaller in nature (512B-16 KB), the more random in nature the I/Os are whereas the greater the overall percentage of blocks are larger in nature (16KB->256KB), the more sequential in nature the I/Os are.
The importance of this comes into play when trying to ensure that the environment the SAN is in is properly tuned for the nature of I/Os running in the environment. The more random in nature the I/Os are, the more the IOPS capability of the SAN becomes important whereas the more sequential in nature the I/Os are, the more the throughput capability of the SAN becomes important.
Average Read-Write Ratio
The Average Read- Write Ratio section helps to illustrate how heavy in reads and/or writes the I/Os being handled by the SAN are. This section is mainly for information purposes.
Volume Statistics
The Volume Statistics section is very similar to the Storage Statistics section, with a few exceptions. The main difference is that where the Storage Statistics section focuses on the SAN overall, the Volume Statistics section focuses on individual volumes. This section has a few extras as well, such as the below table:
The table above shows all of the volumes currently on the SAN as well as capacity information and various performance metrics for those volumes. The table’s performance metrics will update every 20 seconds and by clicking on a specific volume within the table, the user can see volume level charts like the following:
These charts are very similar to the ones in the Storage Statistics section and have the same functionality as those, they are however, specific to the volume currently chosen in the table.
One extra section that each volume has is the Volume Space Statistics section. This section shows the trends in capacity growth for the specific volume currently chosen in the table. If snapshots are enabled on the volume, the blue line at the top of the green shaded area will be higher than the shaded area, indicating the extra capacity being used by snapshots for that volume.
Hardware Health
The hardware Health section shows the user all hardware related information for the SAN, as shown below.
There are columns on either end for the Left and Right Controllers. What these columns show are the CPU/Memory utilization, displayed as a percentage, as well as Network Utilization on each interface broken down in receives (Rx) and transmits (Tx), also displayed as a percentage of the overall potential of each interface.
In the middle there is a physical representation of the SAN. All components can be hovered over to display additional information. The drives themselves have a few pieces of information – the tags, stars, activity bars, and status LEDs.
– The tags represent whether a drive is a part of a storage pool (blue tag) or part of the cache (purple tag).
– The stars represent whether a drive is an MLC drive (green star with 3 drive writes per day [DWPD]) or an eMLC drive (yellow star with 10 DWPD). The DWPD represents how quickly the endurance of the drive will go down. For example, a 240 GB MLC drive can have 720 GB (240 GB * 3) of data written to it every day for 5 years and its endurance will be guaranteed for that timespan.
– The activity bars show the current I/O load on a particular drive, updating a few seconds. The higher the bar, the higher the I/O load on a particular drive.
– The status LEDs show the current status of the drive. Green LED means a good status. Yellow LED means a spare drive. Red LED means a failed drive. Blinking red LED means rebuilding/reinitializing drive.
Hovering over the components of the controllers will give specific information on those, such as the fans, motherboard, CPU, etc
The button highlighted in the screenshot above, Front/Rear View, will flip between a front and rear view of the chassis. Looking at the rear of the SAN, information on the power supplies, fans, and network interfaces can be seen.
– Power supplies are redundant and one power supply powers the entire chassis at any given time.
– Network interfaces give information on IP address, status, and speed.
System Health
The System Health section shows software health information for the file system on each controller, the storage pool(s), logical disks, and volumes, as shown below.
For the File System section, partition utilization on each controller can be seen. If any partition reaches 50% utilization, the status will change to warning, whereas if the utilization reaches 90%, the status will change to critical.
The Storage Pools section shows space utilization on each storage pool found on the system. The status will change to warning when the utilization reaches 50% and it will change to critical when it reaches 90%.
The Logical Disks (LD) and Volumes sections simply show the statuses of each LD or volume.
Event Log
The Event Log section is the place to see anything and everything happening on the SAN.
Minute filtering can be applied to the log in terms of time periods, specific controllers, specific categories, and severity levels. The screenshot above shows an example of an informational, warning, and critical alert.
Management Console
The Management Console is for those that prefer to manage the SAN via shell access.
A full-fledged CLI console is available for management purposes and scripts can be written and executed if need be as well.
Dashboard
The Dashboard section contains options that pertain to the SAN as a whole. The sections below highlight some of the more common options.
System
The System subsection is useful for general settings on the SAN, as described below.
Date and Time
The Date and Time option allows the user to set the time on the SAN to ensure it is properly synced with other systems in the environment. A user can sync the clock in two different ways: adding an NTP server or syncing with the local system, which in this case is the computer being used to access ManageTrends.
Whenever changes are made to the date and time, ManageTrends automatically logs out. Upon logging back in, time changes should be applied.
Update
Whenever an update is available for the SAN, the StorTrends Support Team will contact customers to let them know that a new patch update is available on their dedicated FTP folders. By going into the Update option, a couple of methods for updating the SAN become available.
The ‘URL’ option allows the SAN to automatically download the patch update straight from the FTP folder and initiate the update process (assuming an active internet connection is available and the FTP port is open). The ‘Patch’ option allows the user to upload the patch update from the local computer accessing ManageTrends.
Regardless of which option is chosen, once the update is initiated, the SAN will go through a series of checks to ensure that both controllers are healthy and ready for the update process. Once this check passes, one controller will update at a time, ensuring that access to data is not interrupted during the update process.
UPS
If there is a UPS that the SAN can connect to directly, the UPS option allows the user to setup the communication to ensure that the SAN will know when the UPS changes to battery power and make decisions about when to power off. This will also allow ‘Write Back’ cache to be enabled on the SAN.
There are three ways to connect a UPS to a StorTrends SAN: Serial, USB, and SNMP. Once configured, the user should see information similar to the below screenshot:
Important information such as whether the UPS is running on AC power or Battery (Status), Battery Minutes, and Battery Charge Remaining can be seen from this pane. There are two options that control when the SAN will commence a clean shutdown after it senses that the UPS is running on battery power: an option for when percentage of battery remaining is crossed and an option for when the battery has been running for a specific amount of time. The defaults are 20% and 5 minutes, respectively, and which ever threshold is hit first will initiate a shutdown of the SAN.
Debug Dump
Whenever there is any sort of issue with the SAN, a debug dump is a great tool to aid the StorTrends Support Team in resolving the issue. A debug dump is simply a collection of log files from each controller so that debugging can be done remotely. The Debug Dump option allows a user to generate a fresh pair of debug dumps.
After the debug dumps have been generated, those files can either be downloaded locally to be upload to the customer’s dedicated FTP folder with an FTP client such as Filezilla, or the files can be directly uploaded from the system using the FTP Upload option. In order to use the FTP Upload option, the SAN needs to have internet access and the FTP port needs to be open on any potential firewalls.
Network
The Network subsection of the Dashboard has a couple of options to create/edit specific network parameters
Alias/Virtual IP
The Alias/Virtual IP option allows the user to create network teams if necessary as well as create aliases on interfaces in order to be able to connect to the SAN from servers.
NOTE: Once the SAN has been configured, there should be rare circumstances to actually need to create new aliases and/or network teams.
Gateway/Static Routing
The Gateway/Static Routing option enables the user with the ability to edit the default gateway on the SAN as well as add additional static routes, if necessary.
Additional static routes will enable each controller to be able to communicate through other gateways other than the default gateway, without interfering with the default gateway. Simply choose the interface that can communicate with the secondary gateway, then input either a destination network (1.1.1.0, for example) or a specific destination host IP (1.1.1.1, for example). Input the proper subnet mask and secondary gateway IP and click ‘Add Route’. The table at the bottom shows all current static routes.
iSCSI
The iSCSI subsection enables the user with the ability to influence how iSCSI connections are made.
Authentication
Under the Authentication option, bi-directional CHAP authentication can be enabled by adding a server’s IQN name and password to the list.
Users & Groups
The Users and Groups subsection allows the user to add users and manage group settings.
Users
Under the Users option, the user can add more users that can access the UI (read only or administrative privileges), change passwords of those users as well as change the password for shell access to the SAN (super user credential).
Alerts
The Alerts subsection allows the user to setup alerting options, such as SNMP traps and email alerts.
SNMP Traps
If the user has an SNMP server within their environment, the user can set that server up under the SNMP Traps option and then choose which level of alerts should be forwarded to the SNMP server.
The StorTrends Support Team can provide the user with a MIB file to ensure they are properly receiving the SNMP alerts.
The E- Mail option allows the user to configure email alerts both internally and back to the StorTrends Support Team, so long as the SAN can access the email server.
If the email server requires extra levels of authentication, those options can be configured as well. A user can also add up to 3 extra recipients for email alerts and choose what level of events should be forwarded.
Controllers
Both the Left Controller (LC) and the Right Controller (RC) have identical options in ManageTrends, so we will be exploring only the LC in this guide.
Left Controller
Control Panel
The Control Panel has options for a specific controller. The sections below will highlight the most important sections.
System
The System subsection has options relating to the controller in general. For example, the user can control the power state of the controller from this subsection.
– Information
The Information option will give the user basic information about the controller.
Network
The Network subsection has options for setting different network parameters for each controller, such as IPs and the BMC/ IPMI module.
– TCP-IP
The TCP-IP option allows the user to set and edit the network parameters of both physical interfaces/teams and their respective aliases.
Simply choose the specific interface/alias, whether a DHCP or static IP should be set, and, if static is chosen, input all the information that is valid for that particular interface/alias. Simply click the ‘Apply’ button for the changes to take place.
The user may also enable jumbo frames (MTU 9000) by clicking the ‘Enable’ button next to the Jumbo Frame option.
– BMC-IP
The BMC- IP option allows the user to set the IP of the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), also known as an IPMI or lights out module.
iSCSI
The iSCSI subsection has options for different aspects of iSCSI connectivity to each controller.
– Portals
The Portals option allows the user to enable/disable iSCSI portal tags and assign different tags to different portals.
System Performance
The System Performance section shows a more granular view of CPU and Memory utilization on a particular controller.
A user can view this information in a historic or instantaneous view. A user can also hover over any point on the graphs and see the time and value at that time.
Network Performance
The Network Performance section shows the user different network metric statistics for each interface on the controller.
The user can choose which interfaces they want to get information from or they can see an aggregate of all interfaces. Information on Sends, Receives, Errors, TCP Anomalies, and TCP Extended errors can all be seen.
Storage
The Storage section has information for anything and everything relating to the actual use of the capacity on the SAN, from the individual Storage Pools to the Volumes on those storage pools to the Targets for those volumes to additional performance charts. The below sections go into more detail into each of those aspects.
Storage Pool Name
Depending on what the storage pool name is for the SAN (sp0 by default) the header for this subsection will differ, but the functionality is the same regardless. This section has a plethora of information for the storage pool in general, which is the collection of RAID arrays within the system being utilized to provide the capacity for the volumes.
The above screenshot shows some simple information about that storage pool such as the current cache settings (Write Through, Write Back, Force Write Back), compression status, and the logical disks that make up the storage pool.
Scrolling down, the next set of information shows how the capacity is being used up on each tier within the storage pool. The Cache Statistics section shows the user how well the cache is being utilized as well as each of the drives that make up the cache and their current endurance levels.
If a cache drive fails or if an upgrade needs to be done on the cache drives, the three buttons under ‘Replace SSD Drives’ will ensure that all data is flushed from the cache before altering the drives in any manner.
The final portion of the Storage Pool Name section has configuration options for data movement. The periodicity settings allow the user to set when they want data movement to happen. For example, if data movement is causing increased latencies within the SAN, the user can schedule periodicity to ensure that data movement only happens during off-peak hours.
The Tier Policy portion has options for the promotion and demotion rates. These rates help determine how data movement happens. The promotion rate allows the user to choose the number of accesses a single block needs to accrue within an hour in order for the system to promote that block into a higher tier in the next hour. The demotion rate allows the user to choose how long a block needs to be un-accessed completely (even a single access to the block will restart the counter) before that block will be demoted into a lower tier, with the lowest possible setting being one day. Promotion rates are determined on an hourly basis whereas demotion rates are determined on a daily basis.
NOTE: Data movement will only kick in when the highest tier reaches a utilization rate of at least 50%. This is done to minimize the impact of moving data while there is plenty of room in the highest tier.
Volumes
The Volumes subsection is the section where the user can find all information about the volumes within the SAN. The volumes are the entities where the data actually resides.
Volume Name
Clicking on any volume’s name will bring up the informational page for that volume.
There are quite a few pieces of information that can be determined about each volume from its respective page. The screenshot above shows information on the current capacity of the volume. There are also two buttons for expanding and deleting a volume. If the user choose to expand a volume, simply input the new capacity they want the volume to be and not the additional capacity. For example, if they were to expand the volume in the screenshot to 400 GB, they would input 400 GB, not 200 GB (200+200).
The target information shows the user the full IQN name of the volume used for iSCSI connections. Without a target, the volume cannot be accessed. This name is used as a unique identifier so that the user easily connect to the proper volumes. By default, when a volume is created, the IQN bares the same name as the volume at the end of the IQN name. The bottom of this portion shows the IPs that can be utilized to connect to the volume. Only alias IPs that have a portal tag enabled will show up in this list.
The next portion is the snapshot portion. This section allows the user to schedule up to six different snapshot schedules for a given volume. Snapshots can be scheduled as frequently as every five minutes or as infrequently as every twelve months.
The six levels are as follows:
– Five minute intervals
– Thirty minute intervals
– Hourly intervals
– Daily intervals
– Weekly intervals
– Monthly intervals
For any given interval, a minimum retention of three snapshots is required and a maximum of 1,024 snapshots total between all intervals can be stored per volume, so long as adequate capacity is available.
The last portion on this page is the profile section. This section will allow the user to set and change the current tier policy of the volume. High Activity means that the volume will have access into the high tier, whereas Low Activity will mean that the volume will only be allowed into the low tier only. As an example, setting a volume to Low Activity during a migration of data onto the volume will force all of that data to go into the low tier. This will ensure that no cold data gets into the high tier. Once the migration is done, the volume can be switched to High Activity. Why would this be important? In the Storage Pool Name section of this guide, an explanation of data movement is introduced. Since promotion data is done at a faster rate (hourly) then demotion (daily), allowing data to rise into the high tier will be faster and more efficient than waiting for the high tier first to reach 50% utilization and then slowly demote the data into the low tier.
The last part shows a graph of how the volume’s capacity is distributed between tiers (Mapped Space) in correlation to the rest of the volumes on the SAN (Other Space).
Snapshots
Expanding a volume in the navigation tree exposes the Snapshots option. Clicking on it brings up the following page:
In this section, the user can see all snapshots that have been taken for a particular volume. From here, snapshots can be manually created and deleted. The Delta Size column shows you the amount of changes tracked between the current snapshot and the one before it.
The example above is notable in a few ways. Any snapshot with a green star next to its name indicates that it is a writable snapshot. Any snapshot with the icon with a silhouette and pencil indicates that it is a manual snapshot.
Targets
The Targets subsection shows a quick reference point to all the targets of all the volumes currently on the system.
A user can ensure that targets are enabled within this table.
SRM
The Storage Resource Management (SRM) subsection includes extra graphs and charts showing other bits of performance information on the SAN.
Enlift Cache Performance
The Enlift Cache Performance graph shows metrics on how the SSD Cache is performing.
Disk Latency
The Disk Latency graph shows latency at the disk level, broken down by the disks that make up each individual logical drive, and can be broken down between average, minimum, and maximum values.
This latency value differs from the latency seen in the Storage Statistics and Volume Statistics sections in that the latency in those sections only accounts for the latency seen in the iSCSI layer. That means that those latencies show the latencies of the I/Os between the SAN and the servers. The disk latency shown in this graph shows you the latency on the disks. Not only does this encompass the iSCSI latency, but it also takes into account latency induced by background functions within the SAN such as data movement.
Workflow Management
The Workflow Management graph shows the actual and predicted workloads on the SAN as well as the amount of background activity on the SAN on a per-hour basis.
The top-half of this graph shows the actual and predicted workloads on the SAN. This is measured as a percentage of performance to latency. They yellow portion indicated the actual workload. The green portion indicates what the SAN is predicting based on past records of actual workload. The predicted workload is used to predict when more data can be moved in the background through functions such as tiering without having adverse effects on performance from the perspective of the servers within the environment. The more data there is to learn from, the more accurate the predictions become to the actual workloads.
The bottom-half of this graph shows the amount of data moved in the background as a percentage of total potential, which is 5 GB/hr. The blue portion is for CSM, which is a striping mechanism between similar logical drives that ensure that data is striped between the multiple similar logical drives in such a way that both capacity and performance are increased for that tier. The red portion of the graph is for ILM, which is the tiering mechanism that moves data between tiers based on promotion and demotion policies.
Information Life Cycle
The Information Life Cycle graph shows you the access patterns on each tier.
For each tier, there are nine classes, which can be referenced within the legend to the right of the graphs. Access patterns can be as “cold” as not having been touched for over a month to as “hot” as being touched over 20,000 times within an hour. For each class, the amount of data that has been accessed is shown, in GB or TB.
As a rule of thumb, the higher classes (6+) should be in the top tier whereas the lower classes (1-3) should be in the low tier for proper balance between tiers.
Snap Assisted Replication
The Snap Assisted Replication (SAR) section allows the user to setup consistency groups, or replication pairs, between StorTrends SANs. By clicking on this section, a wizard will come up to setup a new replication pair.
The first part of the wizard simply asks for the IP of the remote StorTrends SAN and the login credentials for it.
After setting that, a table with the volumes on the local SAN comes up. Within this table, as many volumes as are desired can be chosen. Those volumes will be part of a single replication pair and will have their snapshots synchronized. This is good in cases like grouping database volumes with log volumes to ensure consistency.
Once the volumes have been chosen, the next screen allows the user to name the remote volumes as well as choose between provisioning types and target names.
Once the remote volumes are configured, the last option for that particular replication pair are shown. Options include WAN optimization, encryption, compression, and deduplication (note that the encryption, compression, and deduplication will only be in effect while the data is in transit). Bandwidth throttling can also be configured.
Finally, a summary page comes up and the replication pair can be created.
Consistency Group Name
Once a consistency group has been created, its name will appear in the navigation tree under the Snap Assisted Replication section. By clicking on the name, a configuration page for that group will come up.
This page has a number of pieces of information. The user can check the current status of the consistency group, check how many snapshots still require replicating, and which snapshot, and its time, is currently replicating, if any.
The user can also see what configuration options are currently set and check and see if any periodicity is set for the consistency group.
At the bottom of this page, the current progress of replication for each volume in the consistency group can be seen.
By clicking on the ‘Schedule Snapshot’ button, the user can create and edit snapshot schedules that will take affect for all volumes in the consistency group.
The snapshot schedule options are identical to the individual volume ones in the Volumes section.
By clicking on the cogs icon to the right of the Replication Pair Settings subsection, the following options show up:
Here, the user can enable or disable WAN optimization, encryption, deduplication, and compression.
Bandwidth throttling can also be configured. By default, replication will run all day, every day when enabled on a particular consistency group. A user may have a need to throttle this replication or schedule periods of time when no replication happens at all. By choosing the days (in the blue column) for a particular schedule (each schedule is a row in the table), the time that schedule should run (in the green column), and how much of the configured bandwidth should be used during that time (in the orange column), the user can manipulate the replication schedules as needed.
In the screenshot above, an example is shown where the max bandwidth for replication is set to 100 MBps. There are three schedules there. The first runs from Monday through Friday from 6PM to midnight at a rate of 90% of the max bandwidth (90 MBps). The second runs from Monday through Friday from 8AM to 6 PM at a rate of 80% of the max bandwidth (80 MBps). And the third schedule runs Monday through Friday from midnight to 8AM at a rate of 90% of the max bandwidth (90 MBps). You can see that the default plan runs the rest of the time at 100%, meaning that on the weekends the entire 100 MBps bandwidth will be utilized for replication.
Physical Disks
Physical Disks section shows different information about the physical disks within the SAN.
Disk Information
The Disk Information subsection shows a list of all the disks within the SAN.
This table shows each disk, its type, capacity, and status, among other pieces of information.
Disk SMART Analysis
The Disk SMART Analysis subsection shows SMART information for each disk within the SAN.
By clicking on a particular disk on the virtual chassis, SMART information will display for that disk, including temperature, endurance rate, non-medium errors, etc. Each drive has a SMART test run on it every day and the user can see multiple days’ worth of information by choosing a particular day from the dropdown menu of dates.
SMART Comparison
The SMART Comparison subsection shows a comparison of various SMART attributes for the disks within the SAN.
This information can be viewed by as many disks as desired found on a particular logical disk. Attributes and disks can be toggled on the right. The chart will show a historical view of the trends for a particular attribute on the chosen disks and show a forecast based on the rates already measured.
Configuration Wizard
The Configuration Wizard section houses a few select wizards that will be used most frequently. Within this guide, the Volume Wizard will be focused on.
Volume Wizard
The Volume Wizard is how volumes are created within a StorTrends SAN. The following walks through the different options that come while running through the wizard any time a new volume or volumes need to be created.
When entering the Volume Wizard , the first thing that comes up is the option to choose between different storage pools on the SAN. The only time multiple storage pools will show up on this page is when the SAN is operating in an Active/Active configuration.
Once the storage pool is selected, it is time to configure volumes. The screenshot above shows the options needed to create a volume.
– The volume name needs to start with a letter and can only use numbers and letters in its name – no spaces or special characters.
– The volume size can be as little as 10 GB and as large as whatever the available capacity is currently shown in green under the input box.
– The tier residency allows the user to choose between high and low profiles, which are explored in the Volumes section of this guide.
– By default, a volume’s target will be identical to its name, except in all lowercase letters. If a change is required to that name, it can be edited.
– There is an option for ‘Allow multiple initiators to log on concurrently’ – this option will allow multiple nodes in a cluster to login simultaneously to the given volume. Without this option enabled, only one iSCSI initiator will be able to login at a time.
Once done, clicking the ‘Add to List’ volume will add the volume to the table below. The user may now go through the same steps to configure more volumes and continue adding them to the list. Once all the volumes that are required are added to the list, clicking the ‘Finish’ button will create the volumes.
Once the volumes are created successfully, a little popup will show talking about the different performance tiers and, more importantly, reminding the user to check that all timeout settings are properly configured on any and all servers connecting to the volumes of the SAN.
Conclusion
This guide is aimed at helping any user that is trying to navigate the ManageTrends UI with any common issues and concerns. If there is something that is not covered within this guide or if further questions persists, the StorTrends Support Team can be contacted via phone at 1-800-892-6625 or by email at [email protected].