How to see and manage Fibre Chanel HBA's in Insight Manager

[Jeff Westwood]

We have 8 servers connected to an EMC SAN using Emulex Lightpulse HBA's. I would like to be able to manage them via Insight Manager. I assume I need an Emulex MIB to do this? Does anyone manage these cards using Insight Manager?

Thanks

Jeff Westwood

[David Claypool]

You also will need some form of agent on the server to monitor the HBA and generate an event when something is wrong. If they currently write to the Windows Event Log, you can read up on EVNTWIN at microsoft.com about how to choose events to send as traps. You may need to hand-write a MIB that matches with the traps it sends.

[Jeff Westwood]

I was kind of hoping that a MIB might already exist. I would imagine there are a lot of people using Emulex cards in HP Proliant servers that would want to do this.

Jeff Westwood

[David Claypool]

The hand-writing of a MIB was only if you ended up going the EVNTWIN route to generate traps from event log entries...

There is an RFC for a MIB for fibre channel, find it here: http://www.fibrealliance.org/fb/mib/mib2_2.htm

Now you just need to find an agent that probes your Emulex card that matches it. No joy on the Emulex site or Googling...

[Jeff Westwood]

I had already tried the Emulex site and did a bit of googling. I didn't find much either, but I did find that Emulex have a centralised management solution called HBAnyware. It's a stand alond app that can be used to manage Emulex HBA's. I will keep looking for an Insight Manager integrated solution though.

Jeff

[Rob Buxton]

Jeff,
What do mean by manage the HBA?
There's the Lightpulse utility that does this in a windows environment. But once set up there's not a lot of additional stuff to manage.

Alas, IM doesn't report any detailed info back from the fabric as you're aware. Even with a Proliant ->HBA -> HP Fabric Switch -> HP EMA Storage the IM view stops at a recognition of the status of the EMA Storage controllers. You need additional SAN Management products to fill out this gap.

[Jeff Westwood]

Hi Rob

I guess I would be satisfied if Insight Manager could report if a HBA developed a hardware failure or lost link to the fibre switch. We do use other software to manage the switches and SAN, but it seems like an end to end management solution is a long way away.

Jeff