Tech Notes

 At the spring Storage Network World (SNW) show in Dallas, I had the pleasure of teaching the hands-on lab session for VirtualWisdom with Andrew Benrey, VI Solutions Consultant, and we had a fantastic response to our “Storage Implications for Server Virtualization” session. We co-presented with Avere and HP 3par, and during the two-hour session, we covered how to use VirtualWisdom to administer and optimize a fiber channel SAN, NAS optimization with the Avere appliance and the use of thin provisioning and reclamation using the HP 3par arrays.

The lab exercises covered all areas of SAN administration. The first exercise looked at how we discover and report physical layer errors. We then looked at queue depth performance, imbalanced paths, and detection of slow-draining devices using buffer-to-buffer credits. In the last exercise, we reviewed a VMware infrastructure showing the virtual machines, fiber channel fabric and SCSI performance.

I found it interesting that for most of the lab sessions, many students picked the VirtualWisdom lab to start with. I believe that with the demand for proactive SAN management, more and more people are finding out about the benefits of VirtualWisdom, and came to the hands-on-lab to see for themselves. When looking at the attendance numbers, our lab was sold out for most sessions. Our most popular session had a sign up list of 52 for 20 seats.  During the six sessions we conducted, we were able to meet and talk with almost 500 attendees in depth about the need for tools like VirtualWisdom and the advantages this platform offers for SAN teams working in a virtualized environment.  Attendees liked the ability to quickly walk through the infrastructure from the ESXi server down to the storage array and spot the anomalies. The ability to go back in time was also of importance. Several customers were in the lab as part of their product evaluation.

Those of you who have seen VirtualWisdom understand how rich our user interface can be. For the lab exercises, I specifically divided up exercises so that the lab attendees had a much simpler and more easily understood interface in which to work. This turned out well as very few of the attendees needed additional help in working with the Dashboard interface.

Storage Network World Hands-On Lab Infrastructure