gathering I/O statistics from devices in SAN...

[Byron Fowlkes]

wondering what would be a way of measuring reads and writes to devices on an OpenVMS cluster that are defined in a EMC SAN... I am not familiar with EMC toolkit stuff so I am asking as OpenVMS Sysadmin.

[EdgarZamora_1]

Is there an issue why you can't use standard OpenVMS performance utilities?

If you want to measure statistics inside the EMC box ask EMC for the "Deltamark" kit. They use this for measuring performance on the Symmetrix and for capacity planning.

[Byron Fowlkes]

I would be appreciative of any suggestions that you may have regarding specific VMS measuring tools... I am familiar with MONITOR at the very least.. not familiar with Capacity Planning tools..

[EdgarZamora_1]

T4 is a very good tool and best of all it's free (although "unsupported"). If your version of VMS is 7.3-2 or lower you can download it from:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/t4/index.html

If you are at a higher version of VMS, e.g. 8.3, you can send email to the T4 maintainer (there's a link on that website) and request the beta kit.

If you have any questions on T4 installation, usage, etc. you can ask your questions here as most of the people here are T4 knowledgeable. Good luck.

[Byron Fowlkes]

wow, genius... apparently this (T4) is the product the previous SysAdmin chose to use for his Capacity Planning reporting and is alreday installed on this cluster (v7.3-2)... now I just need to figure out how to get some metrics.. ( hope it is intuitive ).. thanks very much Edgar.. will start looking at this..

[EdgarZamora_1]

You should check out TLVIZ and CSVPNG on the T4 website. TLVIZ installs on your PC and is a great tool for visualizing T4 data.

[Richard W Hunt]

We have OpenVMS 7.3-2 running with both HSG80 and EMC Symmetrix disks. They are both connected via KGPSA cards, so BOTH look like DGA disks. I/O statistics tools work fine on both disk sub-classes. You can get I/O counts, I/O queue depth, ... anything you want. MON /TOPDIO and MON DISKS work fine. The only difference you usually see are things like when you do a GETDVI, you would see "EMC xxx" instead of "HSG80", you would see different cylinder/track/sector geometry, and a few piddly-squat minor details. But they otherwise are exactly the same. The EMC disks even go through the "generic" disk driver.

Is there something you DON'T see that you wanted to see?

[Byron Fowlkes]

reply to Richard : thanks for those desktop analysis tools , I haven't had time to absorb all the stuff about using T4 yet but I am definitely going to be looking at this...

[Byron Fowlkes]

reply to Richard and Edgar: well I certainly meant my thanks to you Edgar for the desktop tools for T4.. Richard I wanted to follow on your thread, when executing a sho dev/full on a volume in the EMC I notice that there are two I/O paths, current and primary with associated operations completed counts.. are these counts related to reads and writes??

[Robert Brooks_1]

If you are adventurous, you can explore the fibre channel SDA extension

SDA> FC

gives a list of commands, qualifiers, and parameters. Of interest may be FC PERFORMANCE

I *think* much of this has been backported to V7.3-2 (in a recent FIBRE_SCSI kit), but I can't guarantee that FC PERFORMANCE is there.


-- Rob