HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform Best Practices Guide (5697-0935, May 2011)

NOTE: To support the use of a Microsoft Outlook contact group, ensure that the VSM server is
on the network and that the SMTP server and the Outlook mail server port are defined in VSM
Monitor.
You can choose specific messages or all messages and then customize by the following categories:
• Specify messages or All Messages of all Message Groups
• By Severities
• By Message Groups
• By Severities and Message Groups – You may specify a different set of severities per message
group
• By Messages
System monitoring
To ensure that the VSM and DPM have maximum system uptime, it is important to monitor the
system health on an ongoing basis using these tools:
• VSM graphical user interface
• VSM event log
• Alerts
• DPM SNMP traps
• Fabric Watch or a similar SAN switch monitoring tool may be used to set up alerts for BB
exhaustion or dropped frames. FC credit exhaustion and frame drop should be rare in SANs
that are operating properly.
SAN health
Multi Router Traffic Grapher tool
The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is written in Perl and works with UNIX/Linux, Windows,
and NetWare systems. MRTG is free software licensed under the Gnu GPL. This tool was found
to be helpful for monitoring switches in the SAN. Some key things that are helpful to monitor are
dropped frames and CRC errors. The MRTG download site is http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/.
Storage Essentials
Storage Essentials discovers the active VSM servers only and provides the following support for
SVSP:
• SVSP back-end visibility
• Storage pool and virtual disk utilization reporting
• SVSP thin provisioning pool utilization reporting
• Multiple SVSP domain visibility and reporting
For more information about Storage Essentials, go to:
http://www.hp.com/go/storageessentials
SAN Design Guide
This guide is a single source for configuration support for storage area networks, interoperability,
and best practices. The guide provides access to HP’s rigorous multi-vendor, end-to-end storage
networking architectural information. See http://www.hp.com/go/sandesignguide.
Monitoring for errors 55