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7 Dell Compellent Storage Center Management Pack 3.0 for Microsoft SCOM 2012/R2 Best Practices
2 Introduction
A brief overview of the major components that comprise the environment is provided in this section.
2.1 Dell Compellent Storage Center overview
The Dell Compellent Storage Center is an enterprise-class storage area network (SAN) that lowers capital
expenditures, reduces storage management and administration time, provides continuous data availability
and enables storage virtualization. Storage Center’s Fluid Data Architecture manages data dynamically at
the block-level, maximizing utilization, automating tiered storage, simplifying replication and speeding
data recovery.
2.2 Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2012 is a tool that can provide comprehensive
monitoring for Windows systems, some Unix/Linux systems, network and storage devices. SCOM 2012
provides no single points of failure, and monitors services, devices and operations for many computers
and devices from a single console. SCOM enables checks for health, performance and availability for all
monitored objects in the environment, and helps identify and resolve problems.
SCOM 2012 R2 added bug fixes, the ability to monitor the health of private clouds, .NET application
performance monitoring, IPv6 support, Java application performance monitoring, analysis of Microsoft
software installations (via System Center Advisor), and improved UNIX and Linux monitoring. For a
complete listing of new features in SCOM 2012 R2, refer to Microsoft TechNet.
2.3 Dell Compellent Storage Center Management Pack 3.0
The Dell Compellent Storage Center Management Pack 3.0 for SCOM 2012 is a collection of monitors,
rules, tasks, views and reports specifically designed to provide accurate and timely information obtained
from Storage Center to the SCOM server. Utilizing the Dell Compellent Storage Center Management Pack,
SCOM can monitor active alerts, disk class performance, volume performance, disk class space usage,
volume space usage, and controller states for Storage Center.
SCOM traditionally acquires data via the use of a monitoring agent that is installed on a client device, such
as a server or workstation. Using the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Provider on the local
machine, the SCOM agent collects discovery, performance and usage data from information published to
WMI. Using the SCOM Management Console, Systems Administrators can view information collected from
installed agents.
Unlike the traditional SCOM data collection model, a monitoring agent cannot be installed locally on a
Storage Center controller. In previous versions of the Dell Compellent Storage Center Management Pack,
a Storage Center Monitor Service needed to be installed on server monitored by SCOM. The Monitoring
Service would collect data from the Storage Center using web-based (API) inquiries. The Monitor Service
would act as a WMI Provider and publish collected Storage Center data to WMI in order for the SCOM
server to access it via WMI calls.