Management software how I hate thee!!!
Management software… it offers so much but fails me in the end; I think that the reason there is so much derision for the software is that we as admins can see how much it gives us. It’s tantalizingly close to making our lives easier but the last bit are forever out of reach mocking us for having expectations of things working, actually making us angrier than having no software at all.
ECC you know it… you might have tangled with the beast during an upgrade that failed and you re-installed from scratch. I’ve used ECC for years and years (I just found some old 4.3.1 media)… and I feel like tattooing “love and hate” onto my fingers.
I love that it gives a wonder view of everything from host to switch to storage. I like to zoning in it keeping all the names consistent, I love that I can give reports to management on everything. I love that everything can be inside ECC (EMC wise… other mfg not so much). I love that I can get some performance information out of it, I love being able to visually see a fabric. The biggest love is that it keeps me from making mistakes: typos, etc don’t happen. I never have to type in a WWN, a zone name or even a host name. Everything is named properly I never have someone type in hostb when it should have been hosta.
I hate that unless there is an agent running it lies to me. Present some storage within ECC to a host without an agent… do relationship from the lun in the array to a host and it will tell you *nothing*. Obviously the software does know, if you look at masking to the host it lists the lun right there. Information I can’t trust is *worse* then no information, ECC goes 90% of the way there; but it fails so spectacularly bad on the last bit. I want to clean up some storage laying around that someone didn’t finish removing completely, or used for a quick test, etc … Finding it is so painful, if I can’t trust the tools in all situations I can’t use them period for that task. I’ve put in multiple RFE over the years… FIX THIS. Storagescope knows it, masking agent knows it, why doesn’t relationship know it! Even worse is that you can get old stale luns if the host agent isn’t running. Stop the host agent add/remove some luns and does it give you the correct data, no it tells you the data it last got from the host when the agent was running. That is simply bad, comeon check a copy of the vcm database before you tell me something untrue that I might take an action on.
Again ECC and it’s 90% of the way, I can add everything but a fabric tape drive manually. Host, Switch, Storage Array all manual, a tape drive know only the the stupid horrid SMI-S. It knows it’s there, if finds it on the fabric, but I can’t categorize it properly. I end up marking it as HDS or HP storage so zoning rules work and but then it screws up reports as it’s now an array. Don’t do automatic discovery only (which is what I hear rumblings of), nor do manual adds either; do *both*.
Lastly make ECC faster, everybody is running from ECC because it’s simply slowing down. In the day it wasn’t too bad, but now? Dear god I want to put my fist through the monitor. I use to have it running on a quad core box that had 16GB of ram on it (it was given to me when some other project was cancelled). It was still slow, under 32bit windows, so I talked them into getting me 64bit windows so I could use more of the memory… not much different. I’ve got Oracle flowing out of my ears here, why can’t I use my own Oracle server and make it as big as I want like I can for the STS database? Sure provide a database with the software for people who don’t have one, but for those of us who do let us USE it. This is switching to my biggest beef with ECC, speed it up. I am almost completely switching over SMC because of this. The java console is a massive PIG, screen updates takes forever.
Lest you think I think only EMC software is bad… having tussled with NetApp’s DFM line as well… it’s even worse. Open it up… dear god it’s a complete mess, if I want to get actual useful data out of it I am using the command line “dfm report” and then making it useful. I loath PerformaneManager in DFM, it’s layout is horrid and trying to get useful data out of it is an exercise in futility. During a rather large fit at a lease end we were evaluating performance data, it annoyed me so much that I ended up doing, logging into every day, clicking every single metric and exporting it to a csv file, which I then wrote some perl scripts to pull it into a mysql database that I then queried using a php to create graphs with jpgraph. Like ECC it has been a massive bear for upgrades, most of the time the guys just throw it out and do a recomplete reinstall so all the trend data is lost.
Other software is just as bad (Openview, etc)… I find them all kinda useful in some way and then they fail me and most usually on the parts that I need help doing. I don’t really need help doing the easy things, or wiz bang features that probably only get used by 1% of users, help me do the hard things that a lot of admins don’t do i.e. storage cleanup only happens when a new frame comes in.