InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity: How AI simplifies HCI, Part 3 – Deep dive into clusters

EzmeralExperts · ‎11-22-2019

In Part 1 of this 4-part series, I introduced HPE SimpliVity with HPE InfoSight and explained how it can make your virtual environment easier to manage. Part 2 focused on how effective HPE InfoSight is at making the IT administrator’s job easy with artificial intelligence (AI) at a host level in that same hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Now I will drill deep into what HPE InfoSight does for your hyperconverged clusters.

Much ado about clusters

A cluster refers to the logical grouping of HPE SimpliVity hosts in your environment, and it can contain one or more hosts. A smaller IT environment might only have 2-3 hyperconverged nodes in a single cluster. A larger environment could have a dozen or more nodes in each cluster, with multiple clusters distributed across the federation. The larger the cluster, the harder it is to see a potential issue before it happens.

That’s pretty much true in any environment. The more you zoom out, the more difficult it can be to find specific information, which is a big concern if you are hoping to spot problems before they happen. Imagine trying to look through the window of an airplane and see the color of a traffic light, just to see if a car on the road below needs to stop. From this high level view you would never be able to see anything that granular.

HPE InfoSight solves that issue for HPE SimpliVity, because it provides all of the information you need in a single view. Take a look at this screenshot. This overview shows information about every cluster in the environment and lets you drill deeper into the details.

The first few columns display the cluster name, the datacenter where the cluster is located, and the virtual machine (VM) count for each cluster.

This information makes it easy and quick to understand your environment. Now let’s drill down even further to see where AI meets SimpliVity.

From 30,000 feet to 10

As an IT administrator, for example, you might want to know what is going on with the Tampa_Cluster_1. With InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity, all you have to do is click on the cluster name and you strike gold. You are presented with two major pieces of information that tell you exactly what is going on: Top Virtual Machines and Average IO.

This view alone can answer most of your VM questions, for example: Is a VM growing out of control? Is another VM hogging all the performance? Do I have backups for that VM? Are those VMs remote or local? Why is this VM writing so much? Go ahead, keep asking. It’s all there! This is the power of InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity. It’s intelligently simple.

HPE SimpliVity gives you bragging rights

Going back to the main cluster screen, you will see columns specifically pertaining to how the space is distributed in the environment, and what I like to call bragging rights: your efficiency ratings.

Let’s talk space!

The Logical Space section consists of VM data, local and remote backups, and the total logical data stored. Quickly you know where the data on this cluster lives, and how your backups are doing.

Staying with the Tampa_Cluster_1 example, you can see that there is a total of 735.9 TiB stored in that cluster; 44 GiB is backed up remotely, 696.6 TiB is stored locally – and the VMs in the cluster occupy 39.3 TiB of space.

The next two columns provide insight into the physical space by displaying the amount of data an entire cluster is using as a percentage of the total space available in that cluster. In this case, Tampa_Cluster_1 is using only 29.1 TiB of physical space out of a possible 39.7 TiB.

Compare that with the logical space of the stored data (735.9 TiB) and it’s clear that the Tampa cluster is achieving amazing efficiency, well beyond the 10:1 ratio that HPE SimpliVity guarantees.

Looking at it even closer, you can quickly see that the 73% mark is being hit on total capacity in the cluster – which means Tampa has about a quarter of its physical capacity remaining. You might ask yourself, Is this too close for comfort?

HPE InfoSight has you covered. Simply go back to the Hosts screen I shared in my previous blog and look at the Space Efficiency dashboard, which predicts when you are likely to run out of space. It’s almost as if InfoSight can read your mind. (I know, I am impressed as well.)

Hyper-efficient hyperconverged

The final group of columns show the compression, deduplication, and efficiency ratios. These values are combined to give you the total savings in your environment, which are bound to be pretty good. As this IDC paper points out, hyper-efficiency is one of HPE SimpliVity’s strengths.

One more look at Tampa and you can see that HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged technology provides a 25:1 efficiency ratio, saving 706 TiB in the cluster. Think of all the money the IT organization saves by not having to buy nearly a petabyte of storage for the Tampa datacenter.

This is one of the many ways InfoSight with HPE SimpliVity enables you – the IT administrator – to be proactive instead of reactive. Go ahead, brag to all your friends.

Let me explain – no, there is too much. Let me sum up.

As you have seen, there really is much ado about clusters. With what appears to be simplistic information, you are able to look down, as if from an airplane window, and get a street-level view into your hyperconverged environment. You get all the necessary information about your cluster capacity and efficiency in a single place.

But wait, there’s more!

In the final article of this series, I will venture into the mind-boggling world of what InfoSight for HPE SimpliVity can do for virtual machines. Stay tuned!