Monitor your storage environment with EMC's VNX Monitoring and Reporting

More By Lauren Malhoit in SMB Technologist, October 17, 2013, 12:14 PM PST // malhoit Email Alert RSS 0 Comments Save Facebook 0 Twitter 8 Linkedin 1

Follow these simple steps for installing and setting up EMC's VNX Monitoring and Reporting application.
EMC's VNX Monitoring and Reporting application can help admins with an EMC VNX array monitor their storage environments. VNX Monitoring and Reporting allows you to keep historical data, which wasn't impossible before but required more effort. Before you needed to download NAR files and be able to read technical logging, or you could pull up Analyzer and watch the graphs, but you had to leave that page up to gather information over a period of time. Once you left that page, you needed to start over again. With VNX Monitoring and Reporting, you can retain data for a few years.

Installing VNX Monitoring and Reporting

The application is a relatively easy install. It requires Navisphere Secure CLI (aka naviseccli) to be loaded on the machine you install VNX Monitoring and Reporting on. You can download naviseccli as well as VNX Monitoring and Reporting from support.emc.com if you have an EMC username and password. You can install VNX Monitoring and Reporting on either a Windows 2008r2 dedicated server or a Linux (RHEL/CentOS) dedicated server. In this article, I'm going to do the install on a Linux server since that has a smaller footprint. If you're putting this on a virtual machine (VM), it might be easiest just to download the .ISO file so you can attach it to your VM's CD/DVD drive. However, you can also choose to download the setup file directly on your VM.

1. Log in with root or as a user in the sudoers file. 2. Attach the ISO or download the setup file to your Linux VM or physical machine. 3. Mount the CD by typing mount /dev/cdrom /mnt. 4. Go into the /mnt directory by typing cd /mnt. 5. Type ls to see everything in the directory (Figure A). Figure A

6. Type ./setup-vnx-mr-v11-linux-x86_64.sh. You'll see it verify and uncompress. 7. Press the space bar to get to the end of the EULA and then type Y to accept. 8. Enter the new or current installation directory. By default, it is /opt/VNX, which is good. 9. Press Y to install to the directory specified. 10. Enter a username to create. By default, the username is vnx, but you can make it anything you like. 11. Enter the service scripts directory, which by default is /etc/init.d. 12. Enter the run levels base directory, which by default is /etc. It will now register the base installation and eventually complete the install. This could take several minutes, and it will show you what it's doing along the way. 13. When the installation is complete, it will tell you the URL to browse to in order to set up the Web GUI: http://<ip_address>/VNX-Config/. 14. Log in with admin/changeme (by default), and you'll see the home page ( Figure B). Figure B

Setting up VNX Monitoring and Reporting

You can add your licenses by clicking Licenses, and you can add your array by clicking Add New under Systems. You'll see the Adding A System page (Figure C), where you can add both block and file level collecting -- you only need the IP addresses for your Storage Processors for the block side and the IP address for your Control Station to do the file side. The Naviseccli Path has been filled in for you by default, so you'll want to make sure that's the path you're using. When you're done with that click Test Connection; if that works, proceed with clicking Save and Apply. Figure C

Now you should be able to get capacity reports and alerts through the VNX Monitoring and Reporting tool. You can add multiple arrays so you can see them all from this utility.